“I’d pay you,” she added, in a small voice, and that nearly undid me.
“Annette, I’m not taking your money.”
“Then I’ll bring a pot roast.”
“That I’ll take.”
Edith set her cup down. “I can teach you, Grandma. Dad did it on me about a hundred times.”
“Then you’re hired,” Annette said, and wiped her eyes with her napkin. “Both of you. Show me.”
So I sat Annette in a kitchen chair, and Edith stood behind her with the comb, because Annette wanted to practice on hair that would hold, and her own set curls were the only hair in reach.
I showed her the two sections and the thin strand pulled from the outside of one into the inside of the other, again and again, like closing a zipper.
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“Pinch it,” Edith said. “Grandma, you have to pinch it, don’t let it go.”
“I’m pinching.”
“You’re squishing.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“It is not the same thing. Dad, show her.”
I showed her. Annette’s swollen fingers took it slower than anyone I had ever taught. She got it wrong four times and a fifth.
Burl laughed so hard he fell off his chair, and Annette laughed too, and on the sixth try she sat back with a half inch of crooked fishtail in her lap and said, “Well, will you look at that.”
“That’s a fishtail,” I said.
“That’s a start,” said Annette.
I did not ask for Wednesdays back. She asked, and she keeps them now. Edith goes, and Burl goes, and Annette sends them home in clean pajamas, sometimes with a note pinned to the collar that says, “Ask your father to look at the braid.” Edith does not need me to look. But I look.
Rachel called the next Sunday at six. Edith told her the whole story before I could, in a rush on the speaker, the class, the porch, the Buick, the nail in the wall. There was a silence on the line when she finished.
“Mom hung your picture next to mine?” Rachel said. “Next to the third-grade one?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” said Rachel, and then, in a voice I had not heard from her in three years, “Oh, Nate. Thank you.”
I told her I hadn’t done anything. I had, though. I had learned to stand in a beauty shop with four other men and be bad at something in front of them, and then less bad, and then good enough. Dwight’s Elsie made the volleyball team. Chet’s four-year-old wears a fishtail to preschool and tells her teacher her dad did it.
Andre sent his wife overseas a picture of the first braid he did without looking, and she wrote back that she had cried in the mess tent. Jerry, who said he had no talent, braids Ella’s hair every morning at the counter before school. Lynette says his is the best of the lot.
Some mornings, when I am up at 5:45 with the coffee waiting for the house to wake, I think about Sid and the kitchen scissors, a man alone with a girl and a comb and no one to teach him.
I think about Annette in a hospital hallway, missing the one day. I think about how one sentence, spoken gently, cost three of us seven weeks of Wednesdays.
And I think about a nine-year-old in a front hall with her backpack held in both arms, saying okay, Grandma. I hope she never says it that way again. If she does, I will be out on the porch with a brush.