Here we are each morning: my husband on our old kitchen chair, its upholstery mended with duct tape, his head bent forward while I comb out his long wheat-colored hair. Not what I thought we’d be doing in our sixties, me dividing the wet silk of it, still stubbornly reddish-gold, only a little white at the sideburns. Three thick hanks in hand, I begin to plait: over, under, over, under. I don’t remember when he stopped cutting his hair and decided to let it grow long as a girl’s — and he was mistaken for a girl once, a tall, stoop-shouldered man-girl, when he stood on the sidewalk, back turned, and a car drove by, honking and catcalling. At him, not me. We laughed, but I had to wonder: When did his tresses, now halfway to his waist, first spill over his shoulders? It must have happened while we slept, as most things do. And how did he come to sit before me so patiently now, head bowed while I braid, as if he were the daughter I never had and this my one chance to weave my care into each over, under, over, under?
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