“Again.” I did it again. She said, “You’re gripping like it owes you money,” and showed me how to loosen my thumbs. I did it again. She said, “Pull toward the head, not away,” and I did it again.
By ten-thirty I had two inches of French braid and a cramp in both forearms I had not had since my first week on a pole. In the parking lot, Jerry stood by his truck and said what none of us could.
“It isn’t the hair. We spent twenty years doing something big, and now we got to learn to do something small.” Nobody had a thing to add to that.
I got better. Not fast, and not evenly, but better. By the third Saturday I could carry a clean braid to the nape of Claudette’s neck.
By the fourth I had learned that you wet the hair first, and that the spray bottle on the counter was not a decoration. Lynette moved me on to a fishtail, which I thought was cruelty, and then to a Dutch braid, which is a French braid turned inside out.
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Between Saturdays I practiced on Edith at the kitchen table, with the radio on low and Burl across from us with his cereal, narrating like a ballgame announcer. “He’s going over! He’s under! No, over!” Every time, Edith said, “Dad, you’re pulling,” and every time I said sorry, and she said, “It’s okay.”
She never once said quit. She sat with her feet hooked on the chair rungs and her shoulders square and let me yank her head around, week after week.
On the fourth Sunday, my hands started shaking. I don’t know why. It was a plain kitchen on a plain morning.
I had a clean, even braid under my fingers for the first time, and I looked at the back of her little neck and the part she had asked me to make straight, and I thought, I am going to ruin this.
My fingers stopped. Edith reached up behind her head without turning around and put her hand over mine.
“Slower, Dad,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I did not trust my voice. I finished the braid, wound the elastic, and told her I had to check on something.
Then I went and stood in the pantry with the door pulled to, in the smell of flour and canned tomatoes, until I was all right. When I came out she was looking at herself in the side of the toaster.
“It’s the best one yet,” she said.
Annette called that month. She called twice, both times on a Tuesday evening while I was washing up after supper. The first time I let it ring. The second time I picked up.
“Nate. I’d like to take them this Wednesday. I made a pot roast. Edith hasn’t come in two weeks, and I thought maybe there was a cold going around.”
“No cold.”
There was a pause. “Is this about the hair?”
“It’s about what you said to her.”
“I only told her the truth, Nate. She’s a girl. She needs to look like a girl. I’m not saying it to be hateful. I’m saying it because somebody has to.” She breathed. “Rachel never went to school looking like that.”
I turned off the water. “Annette, I know you love her. She’s nine years old. She heard you tell her she looked like a boy, and she said okay, Grandma, and she stood there. I won’t have her stand there again. Wednesdays will wait, until you tell her yourself that you were wrong.”