The Braid I Learned for My Wife

I thought about Tonya on the porch with the phone. Laughing at things on the screen. Not coming into the therapy appointments, waiting in the car. I had seen it as lazy. I had seen it as taking our money and not caring.

I thought about her face at the kitchen table when she said, you have no idea how much work she is, and what had crossed it after.

“It doesn’t make it right,” Carrie said. “What she did. Ella had to brush my hair before school, and that’s not right. But I don’t think she was just sitting out there not caring. I think she was hiding.”

“From what?”

“From me,” Carrie said. “From how I look now.”

I sat with that for a long time. I am not a man who changes his mind fast. But I had paid that woman twenty-four hundred dollars and I had thought the whole time that I was buying help, and it turned out I was the only thing standing between her and the repo man, and neither one of us had said so out loud.

“I’m not calling her,” I said finally. “I’m not going to fix it for her.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“But she can come here. Any time. You tell her that. Our door’s open. I’m not mad at her anymore.”

I was a little mad at her still. But I was a lot less mad than I had been, and Carrie knew the difference, and she squeezed my hand.

Sunday

We had not been to church since the stroke.

It was not a decision. It was just one more thing that had gotten too hard. The Methodist church is two blocks off Main, red brick, steep steps out front. Carrie had not wanted to be the woman everybody watched get up the steps with a cane.

But that fifth Saturday, in Peg’s chair, she looked at her braid in the mirror and said, “I want to go tomorrow.”

“To church?”

“I want to go tomorrow,” she said again, and that was the end of the discussion.

I braided it that Sunday morning in our bathroom, with Ella in the doorway supervising. I took my time. I did not rush a single crossing. It was the best braid I had ever done, right up until the very end, where the hair gets thin and it went off a little crooked the way it always did.

“Do it over,” Ella said.

“No,” said Carrie. “Leave it.”

We parked in the handicapped space by the side door. The ramp is on that side. Carrie wanted to go in the front, so we went in the front, one step at a time, her cane on the right and her left hand on my arm. Ella walked behind us carrying her mother’s purse.

The organ was already playing when we came in. I do not remember the hymn. I remember that the whole church turned its head at once the way a church does when the door opens late, and that nobody said anything, and that a couple of the older women in the side pews put their hands to their mouths.

I walked her down the aisle the same way I walked her down it nineteen years before. Slower this time.

We went to our old pew, fourth from the front on the left. I helped her sit. I set her cane against the end. And then, because I could not help it, I turned around to look at the room, and I saw Tonya.

She was in the very last pew, by herself, on the aisle. I had not known she was coming. I do not think Carrie had either. She had her coat still on.

She was not looking at me. She was looking past me, at the back of her sister’s head, at the braid hanging down the back of Carrie’s sweater, crooked at the very end.

I watched her look at it. I watched her face. Then I turned around and faced the front, because whatever was happening back there did not belong to me, and church is not the place for it.

Nobody said anything to Tonya that morning. I made sure of that. When the service let out, people came over to Carrie in waves, and hugged her, and told her how good she looked, and asked about the hand, and a few of them told me what a good job I was doing with the braid.

When I looked back again, the last pew was empty.