The Braid Job

I still don't know why I flicked on all the overheads instead of just the ones over the sink. Habit, maybe. When you walk into a barn you light the whole barn. So the treatment bay of the Armstrong Tree & Vine Clinic lit up like a hockey rink, all at once, and there was Shirley, leaning against the steel sink with a clipboard, like she'd been waiting there since Tuesday.

"Well," I said. "Small world."

"Traci Weller." She didn't move off the sink. "Sixty-one years old and you still walk into rooms like you own them."

"You're supposed to be retired. I heard you retired."

"I heard you were selling the farm." She set the clipboard down on the counter and folded her arms. "We heard a lot of things about each other, apparently."

It had been, what, forty years since we'd worked the same summer at the nursery? Longer. I was twenty-one that summer, she was twenty-two, and after it ended we kept meaning to call and then one day it had been forty years, and calling got weird. That's how it goes. You don't fall out with people like Shirley. You just drift, and then you walk into a lit-up treatment bay and there she is.

"I'm not selling," I said. "I'm diversifying. Which is why I'm here. The pruning contract. The one for the Henderson estate orchard, the hundred old apples."

"I know which contract."

"Then you know it's the difference between a decent winter and a bad one. For me, I mean. Not for you, you're clearly doing fine." I waved a hand at the bay, the stainless benches, the hoist rig, the little tags on the trees in quarantine along the far wall. Everything tagged and tidy. Shirley always did like tags.

"You're doing the interview thing," she said. "Sitting down."

"There's a chair."

"There is. And an application form on it. But the form is a formality." She picked the clipboard back up, looked at it, set it down again. "The contract comes through me now. I manage this place. And it's yours. I signed it this morning, before you ever walked in. Your orchard's the best-kept in the county and everybody knows it."

"Then why am I here?"

"Because I wanted to see you. And because I want to ask you for something that has nothing to do with the contract. You can say no and walk out with the paper either way."

"Ask."

"I want a trust trial. Just for me."

I remember standing there waiting for her to laugh. She didn't laugh. That was the part that took a second to sink in.

"A what?"

"A trust trial. You do a thing that's inconvenient and a little humiliating, on my say-so, because I asked, and you stop the second you want to. No paper rides on it. I've wondered about you for forty years and I'd like to stop wondering."

"What kind of thing?"

She came off the sink then, walked a slow half-circle around me, the way she used to walk the seedling rows. "It's about your hair."

I put a hand up to it before I could stop myself. The gray ponytail. I've worn it the same way since the nineties. "My hair."

"Your hair. Take the braid out."

"There's no braid. It's a ponytail."

"Then take the tie out."

"Shirley."

"Take the tie out, Traci. Or take your contract and go home, and I'll still be glad you came." She said it pleasantly. That was the unnerving part, how pleasant she was about it, like she was asking me to pass the salt.

I want to tell you I thought hard about it. I didn't, really, or not about the right things. I thought about forty years, and that summer at the nursery, and my hands went up and pulled the tie out before my pride caught up. My hair came down past my shoulder blades. It's gone thinner than it used to be, and whiter than I'd have picked, but there's still a lot of it and it all fell loose at once.

"Good," she said. "Now stand still."

She crossed behind me and I heard her pick something up off the counter. A comb, a wide one, the kind we used to run through wet shingles of root balls back at the nursery. Then her fingers were in my hair, at my temples, pushing the loose strands back off my face, and I have to admit the first thing I felt wasn't dignity.

"You still part it in the middle," she said.

"People don't change."

"You'd be surprised." She started combing. Slow, from the temple down, one pass, then another, then she'd gather the swept hair over my shoulder and start a new section. She wasn't rushing it. That was the strange part, how unhurried she was, like we had all evening and the contract was a small detail. "How long since anybody did this for you?"

"I do it myself. Every morning."

"That's not what I asked."

"Then never," I said, and she made a small humming noise like she was writing that down.

The bay was quiet. The quarantine trees dripped their irrigation on a timer somewhere, that soft tick and hiss, and the heater ticked, and under all of it the comb. I stood there with my hair coming loose over my shoulders and tried to feel like an applicant. It's an evaluation, I told myself. It's a weird test. Let her do her weird test, get the paper signed, drive home.

Then she stopped combing.

Her hand came to the nape of my neck, under the fall of hair, and gathered a handful of it. Not grabbing. Gathering, deliberate, the way you'd take hold of a rope you intended to use. And she pulled. Not hard, not anywhere near hard enough to hurt, but enough that my chin came up and my head tipped back and I was suddenly looking at the ceiling pipes.