The French Braid for Picture Day

I did not hear what was said. I had the windows up. I only watched. Annette stood in the doorway in her cardigan with her hair set, and her hand went to her mouth. Edith held out the photograph. Annette took it and looked at it for a long time without moving.

Then she lowered herself, one hand on the doorframe, onto the front step. A sixty-six-year-old woman with a bad hip and good church shoes, sitting on her own cold concrete with a school picture in her lap.

Edith sat down beside her. I could see Annette’s shoulders moving. Edith put a hand on her arm, the way she had put hers over mine.

After a long time Annette looked up, over her granddaughter’s head, down the walk, through the windshield, straight at me. She lifted one hand. Not a wave. More like a woman asking someone to wait.

I got out.

I stopped at the bottom of the steps. Edith moved over to make room for me. I did not sit. Annette’s eyes were red, and she was not trying to hide it. She held the photograph against her chest.

“I drove by on the twentieth,” she said. “I told myself I was only checking. That I’d see it was a mess and I’d have been right. And I watched you do her hair. You never looked up. You had your tongue between your teeth.”

“I always do that.”

“Sid did that.” Her voice cracked on the name. “When he tried.” She smoothed the photograph with her thumb. “I need to tell you something, and I need Edith to hear it, and then you can decide what you want to do.”

“Grandma, you don’t have to,” Edith said.

“Yes, I do, sweetheart.” She looked down the street, not at either of us. “When Rachel was eight, my mother was dying in Saginaw. Seven weeks. I couldn’t leave her and I couldn’t take Rachel, so I left her here with her father. Sid was a good man. Pipefitter, thirty years, never missed a day.

“He loved that girl more than his own life. But nobody had ever shown him how to do hair. He tried every morning for seven weeks with a comb and a rubber band. When it knotted and she cried, he cut the knot out with the kitchen scissors rather than hurt her.”

She laughed once, with no happiness in it.

“I came home to a daughter who looked like she’d lost a fight with a lawn mower. Picture day had come and gone, and there was the picture on the refrigerator, her hair cut off at the ears and a clip he’d found in my drawer. She wasn’t smiling. You know the look.”

Edith nodded. I knew it too. I had seen it on my own child.

“I cried over that picture for a year,” Annette said. “I was in a hospital hallway holding my mother’s hand and I missed the one day. And I told myself it wasn’t his fault, he did what he could, but a man alone cannot raise a girl.

“It isn’t in them. I’ve believed it ever since. I said it to Rachel. I said it to my sister. And I said it to Edith, a little girl, because I was afraid for her. I was so afraid I forgot what it does to hear it.”