“A French braid.” I put the truck in park, which was not necessary at an empty stop sign, and looked at her in the mirror. She has her mother’s gray-green eyes and my stubbornness, and right then she had both of them lined up. “Okay. I’ll learn it. Give me till picture day.”
“Picture day is October,” she said, doing the math. “That’s six weeks.”
“A lot can be learned in six weeks.”
She did not say anything. But the muscles in her jaw let go, and for the first time since the front hall she let out a long breath.
I should say how things stood, so nobody gets the wrong idea about Annette or about me.
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Rachel and I were married eleven years. We split three years ago without a villain on either side, the way a lot of marriages end in a town like ours. She took a job in Charlotte, a good one, the kind we could not get up here, and she never fought me for the kids.
She said they were rooted and she did not want to pull them. She calls every Sunday at six. She flies up at Christmas and for a week in July. I have never said one word against her in front of either child and I do not mean to start.
Annette is Rachel’s mother, and she was part of the package, and I mean that kindly. She lives nine miles from us. For three years she has taken the kids every Wednesday after school, fed them supper, checked homework, and sent them home in clean pajamas.
I work a rotating schedule with call-outs, and without her I would have lost my place on the crew. I never forgot it.
People ask me, when I tell this story, why I did not just let Annette keep doing Edith’s hair. She had the skill. She had done Rachel’s hair every morning for eighteen years. It would have been easy, and Edith would have gone along.
But Edith did not ask Annette. Edith asked me. That was the whole answer then and it is the whole answer now.
The next morning I took the ponytail out and put it back in, worse, and Edith went to school with it. I watched her walk up the sidewalk to the front doors with her back very straight, the way you carry a full cup of coffee across a room.
Sunday morning I tried a braid on her at the kitchen table, working from a video I had watched twice. At the third cross she said, “Ow.”
“Sorry. Hold still.”
“I am holding still. You’re pulling.”
“You’re supposed to pull. That’s how it stays.”
“It doesn’t feel like it’s supposed to stay. It feels like it’s supposed to come off.” She was right. When I let go, the whole thing slid down her head like a bad roof and came apart in her lap.
We both looked at it, and then, to my surprise, she laughed, a small honest laugh, the first I had heard from her in four days. “You tried,” she said. “That counts.”
“It doesn’t count. I’m going to get it right.”
On Thursday I stopped at the feed store for a mineral block for my brother-in-law’s heifers, and there was a flyer on the corkboard by the register. It was written by hand in blue marker on a sheet of pink paper, with a drawing of a pigtail in the corner.