The French Braid for Picture Day

“Wrong,” she said, as if it were in another language.

“That’s all I’m asking.”

She hung up. I stood in the kitchen with the phone in my hand and my pulse in my ears. I was not angry. I did not raise my voice and I did not say one word I’d want back.

But I felt as sick as I have ever felt, because I was taking from my children the only grandparent within six hundred miles. I knew what it would cost them. I knew what it would cost me, in call-outs and cold suppers and a house with no Wednesday in it. I did not take it back.

Edith was in the doorway in her pajamas. “Was that Grandma? Is she mad?”

“I think she’s sad,” I said. “And I think she’s scared. Come here.”

She came and leaned against my side. I put my hand on her head, on the wild part of her hair, and after a while she said, “I miss her pot roast.”

“Me too.”

“But I don’t miss the other thing.”

“I know.”

Week five was a storm. A wet, heavy snow came off the lake the second weekend of October, early and ugly, and it took down limbs and lines across two counties.

I got called out at three in the morning on Saturday and spent eighteen hours in a bucket truck, restoring a feeder on the east side of the county in snow up to my shins. I missed class.

Sunday I could barely lift my arms. Then my phone buzzed on the counter with a text from Lynette. “Heard you were out on the lines. Come by my place at two. Back porch. Bring Edith.” I almost said no. But Edith was already putting on her boots.

Lynette lived in a small tidy ranch behind the shop. She had set out a chair, a spray bottle, a towel, and a plate of coffee cake. She sat Edith in the chair, handed me the comb, and stood behind me with her arms crossed.

“You do it. I won’t touch.”

I took the crown and split it in three. I went over, over, add. Lynette said nothing, nothing, nothing, and then she said softly, “There. Stop thinking. Your hands know it.” I ran it down to the end without stopping. It was even and tight, and it lay along Edith’s head like a rope that knew where it was going.

“That’s a French braid,” Lynette said. “That’s all of it. You can go home now.”

Edith turned around in the chair and said to her, very formally, “Thank you for teaching my dad.” Lynette had to take her glasses off the beaded chain and wipe them on her sleeve.

Picture day was Tuesday the twentieth. I had traded shifts so I could start at nine instead of seven. I was up at 5:45 with the coffee going and the brush, the comb, and the spray bottle laid out on the kitchen counter like surgical instruments. I had gone to bed practicing in my head.

Edith came down at 7:15 in the blue sweater she had picked out herself the night before, the soft one with the crew neck. At the closet she had said, “I want the blue one. It matches my eyes.”

“Your eyes are gray, bug.”

“They’re blue in the sweater.”