The French Braid for Picture Day

Dads’ Braid Class. Saturdays at nine. Six weeks. Twenty dollars a week. Lynette’s Shear Delight, Route 31. All skill levels. Bring big hands.

I stood there ten minutes. Two farmers I knew came and went, and one of them nodded at the flyer and then at me and said nothing at all, which is the kind of mercy people do for each other up here. Then I wrote the number on the back of my hand with the pen from the register.

The woman who answered was Lynette Kowalski. Everybody in the county knows her. She has done hair out of the same cinder block shop for thirty-eight years, under a faded pink awning with a sign out front that says walk-ins welcome and, underneath, in smaller letters, we know who you are.

“I do this every fall,” she said. “Some fella comes in because his wife passed or his wife left or his wife took a job on third shift. Never for himself. Always for a girl. Bring big hands. They learn faster. The little-fingered ones get lost in it.”

“I’ve got big hands.”

“Then you’ll be fine. Saturday. Don’t be late, and don’t be proud.”

The first Saturday, five of us sat in folding chairs in a beauty shop, feeling about as stupid as it is possible to feel.

The shop smelled like perm solution and hot hair and the coffee cake Lynette keeps in a Tupperware under the counter. Five mannequin heads sat on clamps along the styling counter, each with a name on masking tape across the forehead.

Dwight was a dairy farmer, forty-four, with milking-parlor hands the size of dinner plates. He had come straight from the barn and apologized twice for the smell.

His daughter Elsie, eleven, had asked him to do her hair “like the girl on the volleyball team.” Chet drove for a parts supplier out of Cadillac and had a four-year-old who would sit for exactly nine minutes.

Andre had come off a night shift at the hospital, still in blue scrubs. His girl was seven. His wife was deployed with the Guard until spring.

And Jerry. Jerry was sixty-seven, with a gray crew cut and a flannel shirt buttoned to the neck. He did not say a word until Lynette asked, and then he said, “My granddaughter’s name is Ella. She’s eight. Her mother is not able. I’m the one who’s got her.” He said it flat, the way you read a number off a gauge.

“Well,” Lynette said. “You came to the right place, Jerry.”

She was sixty-one, small and wiry, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a rattail comb in her back pocket like a pistol. She handed each of us a mannequin. Mine had a chip out of her nose. I named her Claudette. Dwight named his Priscilla. Chet said his was Rudy, and nobody argued.

“Three sections,” Lynette said, and clapped once. “Left, middle, right. Not two. Not four. Over the middle, never under. And every time you cross, you pick up a little hair from the outside edge and add it in. That is what makes it French. If you do not add, it is just a braid. A fine braid. Not what you came for.”

“What if we forget?” Dwight asked.

“You won’t. Your hands will remember before you do.”

My first braid looked like a dropped rope. Lynette came down the line, picked the end of mine up between two fingers like a dead mouse, pulled the elastic, shook it out, and handed Claudette back in four seconds.