They are not friends. But he nods at her now, and last month she held a door.
Where things are.
Pia’s hair is at her shoulders. She has it in a ponytail most days and she does it herself in about ninety seconds and she is unbearable about how fast she can do it.
She swims on Tuesdays now, which she has never done, because she could not
Child Care
deal with it afterwards.
Mattie still does it for the concerts. She asks him to. Half-up, with the small pins she used to pull out, which is style number nineteen.
Enid comes on Sundays. They are not fixed and I do not think they will be fixed, but she comes, and she has started doing something with Pia on a Sunday afternoon that Mattie says he is not allowed to watch.
She is teaching her to do the forty-one.
Out of the notebook. Her daughter’s handwriting.
And the four plaits, because people always want to know what happened to the hair.
Three went to the charity. It took eleven weeks and Pia got a card back with a photograph of a wig on a stand, which is not the same as a child and which she has on her wall anyway.
The fourth is in a shoebox on top of
the wardrobe, tied at both ends with the ribbon from the concert.
And in the June, Mattie did something I would not have predicted.
Education
He took it to Enid’s.
He did not give it to her — that was made very clear to me and I think it matters. He took it, and put it on her kitchen table, and let her hold it, and then he put it back in the box and took it home.
Twenty minutes, in the kitchen where it happened in 2006.
Enid rang me that evening, which she had never done and has not done since, and she was not really crying, and what she said was:
“He let me hold it and then he took it home. I want you to know I understood that. He’s not daft.”
Concerts & Music Festivals
“I’ve had one in my hand before and I didn’t deserve to keep that one either.”
And the last thing.
In the March, Mattie showed me the last page again, because by then he was able to look at it.
