The Braid I Learned for My Wife

What Tonya heard

Carrie heard about it first, from her friend Jill Harper. The same Jill whose sewing room Tonya was sleeping in.

Jill called on a Tuesday night. Carrie took it in the living room, and I heard her side of it from the kitchen.

“No. No, Jill, I didn’t say anything to anybody. Neither did Matt.” A long pause. “Who said that? At the cafe?” Another pause. “Oh, no. Oh, Jill.”

When she hung up she sat for a while with the phone in her lap.

“Tonya went into the cafe this morning,” she said. “For a job. They’re hiring for the breakfast shift. Arlene was at the counter, and Arlene said, right in front of everybody, ‘Weren’t you the one staying with Carrie? Who was doing her hair all that time?'”

“Arlene said that?”

“Arlene’s not mean. She just doesn’t think.” Carrie looked at her hands. “Jill said Tonya didn’t say a word. She just went white and walked out. And it’s been like that all week. At the grocery store. At the bank. Everybody asking how Carrie’s doing, and then saying how sweet it is, Matt doing her hair. And looking at her.”

I did not say anything. I did not feel good about it. I had wanted Tonya out of my house, and I had wanted her to know what she had done. I had not wanted her walking out of the cafe white in the face in front of half the town.

“There’s something else,” Carrie said. “Jill told me some things. About the money.”

The three hundred

This is what Jill told Carrie, and what Carrie told me, sitting in the living room that Tuesday night with the television off.

When the bank closed in September, Tonya got six weeks of severance. The divorce had already taken the house. Her ex-husband had kept the truck and she had kept the car and the payments on it. By November she was two payments behind and the severance was gone.

She had not told anybody. Not Carrie, not their mother, not Jill until Jill found the notice from the finance company on the kitchen counter.

“She was too ashamed to ask us for money,” Carrie said. “Jill said she cried about it. She said if she just asked me for a loan, after everything with the stroke and the hospital bills, she’d never be able to look me in the face again. So when you needed somebody, she thought…”

“She thought she’d take it as wages,” I said.

“So it wouldn’t be asking.” Carrie’s eyes were wet. “And then she got here, Matt. And Jill says she couldn’t stand it. Seeing me like this. She used to be the one I went to when I skinned my knee. Jill said she’d come home some Saturdays and just sit in the car in the driveway. She said she couldn’t watch me try to button my coat.”