The Braid in the Beauty Shop Window

I sat on that step a long time after we hung up. It did not change what Arlette had done.

A grown woman had lied to a beauty shop to stop a child from doing a good thing, and nothing in the past made that right.

But I understood it now, and understanding it made me sad instead of only angry.

Somewhere inside my sixty-six-year-old mother-in-law there was still a twelve-year-old girl sitting at a kitchen table with her braids on the floor.

I didn’t tell Maren that part. Not yet. It wasn’t mine to tell, and I wasn’t sure it would help a twelve-year-old to know it.

I only told her that her appointment was next Saturday, and that I would be standing right beside her.

That week went by slowly. I drove my route morning and afternoon, sixty-two kids and forty miles of county road, and every time I passed the turn to the Pratt place I looked down the driveway for a sign of Josie.

Maren measured her braid every night that week, as if it might shrink.

She wrote Josie a letter in her best handwriting on lined paper and folded it into a square, and she asked me if it was all right to send it along with the hair.

I called Josie’s mother on Tuesday. Her name is Tove, and she was so happy I could hear her trying not to cry.

She said the wig maker had told her she could start as soon as the last braid came, and that it would take about ten weeks.

“Josie doesn’t know yet,” she said. “I didn’t want to promise her something and have it fall through. She’s had enough things fall through. I’ll tell her when it’s in the mail. She’s going to be over the moon.”

I did not tell her what had happened the Saturday before. There was no reason for a mother with a sick child to carry one more ounce of somebody else’s trouble.

I just said, “It’ll be in the mail by noon Saturday. You have my word.”

Arlette did not call that week, which was not like her. On Wednesday she did not stop by with her usual loaf of bread.

On Sunday she was not in the alto section, and the choir director said she had a cold.

Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. I prayed for her in the pew that morning, honestly, and I prayed for Josie, and I prayed for my own temper, which I could feel sitting just under my ribs like a coal in a woodstove.

Saturday morning came up clear and cold, the kind of October morning in central Minnesota where the sky is so blue it almost hurts and the frost is still white on the grass in the shade at eight o’clock.

Maren came down to breakfast in her green hooded sweatshirt, the one with the frayed cuffs that she wears to every important thing, and she had brushed her hair until it shone.

She ate half a piece of toast and said she wasn’t hungry.

I put my hair in a ponytail and pulled on my navy fleece, and we drove into town with the radio off.

My husband had called at six to say he couldn’t get off, that the farmer had a field to finish before rain on Monday, and he was sorry.