The Braid I Learned for My Wife

Ella

Ella started watching on the second Monday.

She came down the hall at six in the morning in her pajama pants with her hair sticking up on one side and leaned in the bathroom doorway. She did not say anything. She just watched my hands.

On Tuesday she was there again. On Wednesday she said, “You’re doing the left one too tight.”

“I am not.”

“You are. Look. It’s pulling her part over.”

I looked. She was right. I loosened it. Carrie, sitting on the lid of the toilet, did not say a word, but I could see her mouth in the mirror trying very hard not to smile.

On Thursday Ella asked if she could try.

So that is how it went. I would braid it on the days I had to be at the shop by six thirty. Ella would braid it on the days I did not, before she caught the bus. On Saturday at two, Peg would wash it and inspect both of us like a drill instructor.

And from about the third week on, the two of us argued about it every single day.

“Mine’s neater.”

“Yours is tighter. That’s not the same as neater.”

“Mom, whose is neater?”

Carrie, who has taught eight-year-olds for nineteen years and has never once picked a favorite in front of the class, would turn her head one way and then the other in the mirror and say, “I think they’re both very nice braids.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.”

One night Ella did her mother’s hair before bed, a loose one so it would not tangle overnight, and when she was done she put her chin on top of Carrie’s head and wrapped her arms around her neck from behind and stayed there. Neither of them said anything.

I was standing in the hall with a dish towel over my shoulder. I backed up into the kitchen so they would not see me, and I stood at the sink for a while and did not wash anything.

Main Street

A beauty shop in a town of nineteen hundred people is a newspaper with a sink in it. I knew that going in. I did not think about it.

By the second Saturday, every woman under Peg’s dryers had heard that Matt Ruland was learning to braid his wife’s hair. By the third, Peg told me, two of the Methodist women had started timing their appointments for one o’clock so they could still be there under the dryers when we came in at two.

They did not stare. They were too polite to stare. But they would lift their dryer hoods a little when I started, and one of them, a retired mail carrier named Shirley, told me at the second Saturday that I was holding my elbows too high, and she was right too.

I was a little embarrassed at first. Then I was not. There are worse things to be known for in a small town.

The thing about a story like that in a town like ours is that it does not travel alone. When people heard that I was braiding Carrie’s hair on Saturdays at Peg’s, the next thing they asked was why. And the answer to why was that nobody else had been doing it.

And everybody in town knew Tonya Wells had been living in our house for eight weeks, and that she had been paid to.

I never said a word about Tonya to anybody but Peg, and I told Peg on the phone in my garage, and Peg is a vault. It did not matter. People can count. They did the arithmetic on their own.