Page 35 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“The winter concert is tonight,” she says.

“It is. Your dress is ironed.”

“Mom used to do a braid. For concerts.” One finger draws a circle around the top of her head. “The one that goes around. Grandma does it too tight and Dad doesn’t know how and the YouTube people talk too much.” She looks at a point just left of my ear. “Can you?”

Four months ago, in August, I offered to help with her hair and got a no-thank-you with a fence around it. She did it herself in the hall mirror that morning, crooked in the back where she couldn’t see. I drove her to camp and said nothing, because you don’t make a nine-year-old like you. You show up on time with the right cup until liking you becomes her idea.

This is her idea. Standing in my doorway with a hairbrush, on a concert day.

“I don’t know how to do a crown braid,” I say, because lying to Margot is how you lose Margot. Her face starts to shut, so I talk faster. “But it’s seven-forty and the concert’s at six. That’s a whole day. Get the stool. We’re going to learn it together, badly, and then less badly.”

She came prepared, because she’s Margot. A photograph, actual paper, soft at the edges from handling: Margot at six, in a velvet dress, hair in a braided crown, with one small hand inside Nora’s bigger one. The braid is beautiful. It circles her whole head like something a queen would wear to do chores.

“Okay,” I say, studying it like a floor plan. “Your mom was showing off.”

“It’s a copy,” Margot says, when I hold it too carefully. “Grandma keeps the real one at her house.”

“Smart system.”

“She practiced on Grandma,” she says. “Grandma complained the whole time. She liked it.”

We set up in the kitchen. Stool, mirror, my phone propped against the flour jar with the volume off, because the YouTube people talk too much. On that we are agreed — the woman in this video has been introducing herself for ninety seconds. Teddy installs himself on the counter as the audience, eating dry cereal, providing calm expert commentary. This from a boy who has never once brushed his own hair voluntarily.

Attempt one comes out looking like a rope that lost a fight. Margot examines it in the hand mirror from two angles.

“No,” she rules.

“Agreed.” I take it down and brush it out. Her shoulders drop a little more with each pass of the brush, the way shoulders do when hands are careful in your hair. She talks more with her back to me. Kids do — face someone and it’s a conversation, turn around and it’s just words falling out. Halfway through attempt two she says, to the window:

“She pulled too tight when she was mad at Dad. You could tell what kind of day it was. Braid days were good days mostly.”

My hands keep moving. Steady, even sections, nothing tightening. “And this braid? What kind of day gets the crown?”

“Concerts. Picture day.” Pause. “The hospital, once. She did it sitting down.”

The elastic goes around. I hold my breath the way you do carrying something full. “There. Two.”

Attempt two is closer — recognizably a crown, drooping on the left. Teddy, from the counter: “It looks like the bread. The twisty bread.”

“It looks like challah,” Margot agrees, deadly. “Again.”

Attempt three, my hands find something. There’s a moment in learning any job where your fingers stop asking permission. It happens somewhere over her left ear — under, over, catch, pull through, the photo propped next to the muted phone. Nora’s work sits there, better than anything my hands will do today. When I tuck the last end under and pin it, the kitchen goes quiet. Even Teddy stops chewing.

Margot lifts the hand mirror. She turns her head left, then right. Then she does the thing her mother must have done a hundred times, angling the small mirror to catch the big one, checking the back.

It’s crooked in the back. Slightly. One plait rides higher than its neighbors, right at the spot a person can’t see on her own head.

“It’s crooked in the back,” I tell her, before she can find it and think I hid it. “I can take it down and go again.”

She finds the crooked part in the doubled mirrors and studies it. Back in August, this kid did her own hair crooked and dared the world to say one word about it. Now she has somebody who will hold up the second mirror, show her the back of her own head, and tell her the truth about it. That’s the real job, it turns out. The braid is just the excuse.

“Leave it,” Margot says. “Fix it before we go. It has to survive school anyway.” She hops off the stool, stops, and addresses the cabinet rather than me. “You’ll do it again before the concert.”

“I will.”

“And the spring concert.”

“Every time,” I say.