The French Braid for Picture Day

“No,” I said, and was surprised to find I meant it.

Then the Buick’s turn signal came on, though there was no one on the road to see it, and it pulled slowly away and went down toward the highway. It did not speed. She drove the way she always drives, like a woman carrying something that might spill.

“Come on,” I said. “Bus.”

The bus was right on time. Edith climbed on with her braid down her back and her chin up. At the top step a boy behind her said something I could not hear, and she answered, and he nodded. That was all.

I sat down on the bottom porch step after it left and put my face in my hands for about a minute, and Burl set the rest of his toast on my knee, which was either sympathy or a bribe.

The picture packets came home the second Tuesday in November, in a manila envelope with a clear window, the way they do. A hundred twenty dollars for the whole package. I bought the whole package. I would have bought the building.

Edith opened it at the kitchen table with Burl kneeling on the chair beside her and me behind them with a dish towel on my shoulder. She took out the big one first, the five by seven. She did not say anything.

I looked over her shoulder. She sat against that mottled blue backdrop all the school photographers use, in the blue sweater, her head tilted a little. Her hair lay over her shoulder in a French braid from the crown to the end, even and tight, each cross as clean as a seam.

And she was smiling. Not the school-picture smile they teach you. Her real one, the crooked one, with the new tooth coming in and her eyes crinkled.

I had to hold on to the back of the chair.

“I look like me,” she said.

“You do.”

“I don’t look like a boy.”

“You never did, bug.”

“I know.” She put her finger on the braid in the photograph and did not say anything for a minute. “I want to give one to Grandma.”

I had not planned on that. If I was honest, I had thought I’d mail one with a note and let it go at that. In seven weeks the phone had not rung once.

“I could mail it.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I want to give it to her myself.”

We drove over on Saturday morning, one of those bright cold days in the middle of November when the sky is the color of a bluebird and the fields have gone gold and the first blaze orange is showing up at the feed store. The maples were bare. At Annette’s, the same wreath hung on the same nail.

I parked at the curb and turned off the truck. “You want me to come in?”

“No. Stay here, Dad. Please.”

She had the photo in a little white paper frame, the kind that folds. She had put on her good coat, and she had asked me to do her braid again that morning at the kitchen window. It took eleven minutes, and it was as good as the first.

I watched her walk up the front walk with it between her shoulder blades. I watched her climb the step and ring the bell and stand very straight, holding the frame in front of her with both hands.