The Braid I Learned for My Wife

Peg

It was Carrie who said Peg’s name.

“I need my hair washed,” she said that afternoon. “Properly. I can’t get my arm up in the shower. Call Peg. She’ll fit me in.”

Peg Lund has owned the beauty shop on Main Street for as long as I can remember. Two chairs, one sink, three of the old hood dryers along the wall, a big mirror that runs the length of the room. Every woman in town over the age of fifty has sat in one of those chairs.

Peg had done Carrie’s hair for her senior prom, and for our wedding, and for every school picture day Carrie has had as a teacher. She had sent a casserole the week of the stroke and a card signed by every lady under her dryers.

I called the shop. Peg answered on the second ring.

“Matt Ruland,” she said, when I told her who it was. “How’s my girl?”

I told her. All of it, more than I meant to. The hand, the brush, Thursday night, Tonya. I stood out in the garage with my phone so Carrie would not hear me, and I told a sixty-two-year-old hairdresser that I could not take care of my own wife’s hair.

Peg was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Bring her in tomorrow at two. I’m done at one thirty. And Matt?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You come in with her. Don’t you drop her off and go sit in the truck.”

Saturday afternoon

The shop smelled the way it has always smelled, like setting lotion and coffee and the hot metal of the dryers. Peg had the door locked and the sign turned around when we got there. She unlocked it and held it for Carrie and her cane.

“There she is,” Peg said, and hugged her, and I watched my wife’s whole face change.

Peg washed Carrie’s hair at the sink first. She worked conditioner through it for a long time, and talked the whole while about the Methodist women’s bake sale and whose grandson had made all-state, and the tangles came out under her fingers like they had never been there.

Then she sat Carrie in the chair in front of the mirror, in the soft blue sweater I had bought her for Christmas, combed it all straight down her back, and looked at me in the glass.

“Roll your sleeves up,” she said.

I did. I had come straight from Saturday half day at the dealer and I was still in my gray work shirt. I rolled the sleeves to my elbows like I was about to run a bead.

“Come stand behind her,” Peg said. “Right there. Now give me your hands.”

I put my hands out. Peg took them in hers and looked at them, front and back. She ran her thumb over the burn scar across the back of my left hand from a slag pop back in 2009.

“Well,” she said. “These are the biggest hands I’ve ever tried to teach. We’ll make it work.”

She showed me how to split the hair into three even sections at the top of Carrie’s head. She had me hold the left section in my left hand and the right section in my right hand and the middle one between them.

“Right over middle,” she said. “Now that one’s the middle. Left over middle. Now that one’s the middle. Right over middle. Keep your tension even. Don’t strangle it. You’re not pulling a chain.”

I crossed the right over the middle. I crossed the left over the middle. I lost the middle completely and the whole thing fell apart in my hands.

Carrie laughed. It was the first time I had heard her really laugh since November, and it came out of her like something that had been shut in a closet.

“Again,” Peg said.