She turned and took Edith by both shoulders. “I was wrong. You did not look like a boy. You looked like a girl whose daddy loves her. I am sorry I said it. I am sorrier than I can say.”
Edith looked at her a long moment. Then she leaned in and put her arms around her grandmother’s neck, hard, and held on.
I stood at the bottom of the steps in the cold with my hands in my pockets and looked at the sky.
We went inside, because it was cold. Annette put the kettle on. Edith ran down the hall to find the slippers Burl had left in August, and I stood in the front hall with my hat in my hands.
There is a wall by the stairs in Annette’s hall that I had walked past maybe two hundred times without seeing. It is covered in school photographs. Rachel, kindergarten through twelfth grade, in plain black frames, all alike, the same blue backdrop, the same blouse with a lace collar.
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All except one. Third grade. Rachel at eight with her hair cut short and jagged around her ears, chin tucked, not smiling, a look in her eyes like she was waiting for someone to tell her what to do.
I thought of Sid, a man I knew only from photographs, a pipefitter who tried for seven weeks to learn something no one had ever taught him. And for the first time I understood what Annette had been guarding all these years in the shape of a hard sentence.
It was not that she thought I was a fool. It was that she thought she had been a coward to leave, and she could not forgive herself, so she had decided it could not be forgiven in anyone.
Edith came back with the slippers and stood next to me at the wall. She looked at the third-grade picture, and then at the white paper frame in her hand. “Do you have a nail, Grandma? This one goes right next to it. So it’s even.”
Annette stared at her. I saw her face change, and I won’t try to describe it. It was something between a grandmother and a woman getting a letter she had waited thirty years on. She went to the drawer by the stove and came back with a nail and a hammer.
I thought that was the end, and it nearly was, but not quite.
We sat at the kitchen table with tea in the good cups. Burl had come in from the yard with half the dead leaves of November in his hair and was working on a plate of molasses cookies. Annette had been quiet a few minutes. She was looking at my hands on the table.
“Nate. There’s a thing I’d like to ask, and you can say no. Edith stays over here some Fridays when you have a call-out. I’d like to be the one who does her hair on Saturday morning. I can do a plain braid. I’ve done it all my life.
“But Rachel used to beg me for the fishtail, and I never could get it.” She held up her hands. Her knuckles were swollen at the joints, the way a lot of women’s are after sixty.
“I don’t have the hands for it anymore. I’d like you to show me, so when she stays I can do it right and she doesn’t have to wait for Monday.”
I opened my mouth and could not think of a thing to say.