***Mattie — about her hair.***
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***Don’t let anybody cut it who isn’t her. Not my mother, not your sister, not a school, not a nurse. Nobody gets to do to her what was done to me.***
***But listen. The point was never the hair. The point was that nobody asked me.***
***So: the day she asks you herself — properly, and then again on a different day, so you know it’s not a mood — it’s hers. Whatever age she is. Take her somewhere nice and let her sit in the big chair and choose.***
***And keep the first plait for me.***
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***I’m sorry I’m making you do this on your own. You’ll be better at it than you think. You’re already better at it than you think.***
Whatever age she is.
The day she asks you herself.
She had asked him. She had asked him in the summer, and again in the October, and again, apparently, on a Tuesday in November, which was the one that made him cry in the bathroom and which his daughter knows about and which he did not know she knew about.
Three times.
The instruction was in a drawer in his kitchen, five blank pages past where he had stopped looking, for six years.
What he did.
He did not say anything for a long time.
And then he asked me, and this is the sentence I will keep for the rest of my life, whether I thought it counted if he had not read it.
Whether the promise he had kept for six years was the wrong promise, and whether that meant he had broken the right one every day since the summer.
I said: Mattie, she left you a
set of instructions and you followed all forty-one. You missed a postscript. That is not a betrayal, that is a hardback notebook.
And he said: “She asked me in the summer. In the garden. And I said when you’re seventeen and she said okay and went and got her bike out.”
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And then he put his head in his hands at my kitchen table and said the thing that I think is the actual middle of all of this:
“She said okay and went and got her bike out. She’s been carrying it round since June because I told her a number.”
