She had a point. I looked at the kitchen, which was gray and dim at that hour, and she said, “Not in here, Dad. Mrs. Kowalski said do it where the light is. You can’t see what you’re doing in the dark.”
She was right. By a quarter past eight the sun had come up over the Dahl’ barn across the road and flooded the front of our small white house all the way across the porch.
The maple in the yard had turned the week before, a bright yellow going orange at the edges, and the leaves had come down in drifts on the grass. Burl’s red bike leaned on its kickstand at the edge of the lawn where he had left it.
Edith sat on the top step with the brush in her lap. Burl, in his school clothes, climbed onto the porch swing with a piece of toast and announced, “I’ll supervise.” I told him to hold still and eat. “That’s supervising,” he said.
I sat on the porch boards behind her. They were cold through my jeans. I sprayed her hair lightly and combed it out from the crown, long and smooth and light brown, with the little curl at the ends that she hates. I could smell the shampoo, the apple one.
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“Chin up,” I said.
I took the crown. I split it in three. I went over, and over, and added.
I want to tell you my hands were shaking. They weren’t. I don’t know where it came from, after all that. They went over and under the way a lineman’s hands go up a pole, without asking me. Left over middle. Pick up from the outside. Right over middle. Pick up. Pull toward the head. Snug.
Edith sat so still I could feel her breathing. Down the back of her head, one cross at a time. Burl quit chewing to watch. A truck went by on the road and slowed, and I did not look up.
At the nape the loose hair ran out and I carried the braid on as a plain three-strand to the very end. I took the clear elastic off my wrist and wound it twice, then a third time for luck. “Done,” I said.
Edith reached back and felt it with her fingertips, following it slowly from the crown all the way down, one side, then the other. She touched the end. “Does it look like a braid?”
“It looks like a French braid. A real one.”
She turned around on the step and looked up at me. She did not smile yet. She looked at me a second too long, the way she does when she is trying to decide whether something is real.
That was when a car slowed down at the curb.
It was a gray Buick. I would have known it anywhere, by the dent in the rear quarter panel from the day Sid backed it into the mailbox years ago and the Michigan State sticker in the window that had been peeling for a decade.
It came to a stop in front of the house. The engine idled. Nobody got out. I could see the shape of a woman behind the wheel with her hands at ten and two.
Edith had seen it too. Her whole body went still. “Dad. Is that Grandma?”
“I think so.”
“Is she coming in?”
“I don’t know, bug.”
I stood up. I did not wave and I did not walk down to the curb. I stood on the porch in my thermal and jeans with the brush in my hand and let her look. She looked a long time, long enough that Burl’s toast went cold and he whispered, “Is she mad?”