21. Aiden
Aiden
Ihave eight minutes to turn Josie’s hair into something she has described as “two braids that become one braid” before we leave for the library.
I’ve had the video on my phone paused on the same pair of hands for three minutes.
“Your pieces are uneven,” Josie says from the kitchen chair.
“I’m aware.”
“And that one is getting fuzzy.”
“I’m also aware of that.”
She watches me in the reflection of the window over the sink. “Mommy could do it really fast.”
The reminder carries no accusation. The words hit square, a reminder of every morning I wasn’t there to watch Krista do this.
“I bet she could.”
I separate the section again and try to follow the woman on the screen. My fingers can repair fencing in freezing rain and handle an agitated horse without getting kicked. A six-year-old’s hair has defeated me twice this week.
A knock sounds at the back door.
“Paige!” Josie twists in the chair, taking half the braid with her.
“Hold still.”
“You said we only have eight minutes.”
“We had eight minutes before you moved.”
I release her hair and open the door. Paige stands on the porch in a green dress with a canvas tote over one shoulder.
“You’re early,” I say.
“By eleven minutes.” She looks past me toward Josie. “You appear to need them.”
“I need another hand.”
“You have two.”
“Neither is cooperating.”
Paige walks inside and sets her tote beside the door. Her gaze moves over the hairbrush, pink elastics, open tutorial, and the uneven sections spread across my fingers.
“How attached are you to this design?” she asks Josie.
“It’s supposed to be two braids that turn into one. Daddy keeps making one fat and one skinny.”
“I can hear you,” I remind her.
“I’m helping Paige understand.”
Paige presses her lips together. “A very clear briefing.”
I lower my voice as she moves closer. “Can you fix it?”
“I can try.” She looks at Josie instead of reaching for the brush. “Do you want me to?”
Josie nods. “You know about braids because you have long hair.”
“Excellent logic.”
I surrender my place behind the chair. Paige removes the elastic without pulling and carefully separates the tangled pieces with her fingers. She doesn’t rush to prove she knows better than I do. She studies the tutorial, asks Josie where she wants the braid to start, then begins again.
I lean against the counter and watch her hands.
She works slowly, crossing one section over another while Josie sits unusually still.
“Like this?” Paige asks.
Josie studies their reflection. “Mommy did it tighter.”
Paige adjusts her grip. “How about now?”
“No. She started it differently.”
“Do you remember where?”
“At the top.” Josie lifts one hand toward her crown. “She made little pieces first, and then they went under. Or over.”
Paige stops with the braid half formed. “Do you want me to undo it?”
“I don’t know.”
The last word wobbles.
I push away from the counter.
Josie stares at herself in the window, her eyebrows drawing together. “Mommy sang when she did it.”
“What did she sing?” I ask.
“I don’t remember.”
Her lower lip trembles.
“That’s okay, baby.”
“No, it isn’t.” She grabs at the end of the loose braid, and Paige immediately lets go so it doesn’t pull. “I used to know. She did my hair every day, and now I can’t remember the song.”
Tears run down her cheeks, hot and fast. I crouch beside the chair, but she slides down as I reach for her and climbs into my arms.
I settle on the kitchen floor with her in my lap. Her hair spills across my forearm as she presses her face into my neck.
“I can’t hear her,” she cries. “I know how Mommy talked, but when I try, it sounds wrong.”
It’s hard to draw a full breath. I know exactly what she means. I can remember Krista’s words, yet some days the sound of her laugh feels farther away than it did the day before.
The clock over the stove advances another minute.
I stop looking at it.
“I wish you could hear her whenever you wanted,” I say, rubbing my palm over Josie’s back.
“What if I forget all of it?”
My first instinct is to promise she won’t. I want to give her certainty because fear is easier to manage when I can turn it into a problem with an answer.
I can’t promise her which details grief will let her keep.
“You’re scared,” I say.
She nods against my neck.
“I am too.”
Her arms tighten around me.
Behind us, Paige picks up my phone and silences the tutorial. She doesn’t offer to finish the braid or suggest another hairstyle. When I glance up, she is standing beside the table, her mouth set in a quiet line of worry.
“You should go,” I tell her. “We may not make it tonight.”
“I’m eleven minutes early,” she says. “I have some time.”
There is no pressure in her voice and no attempt to make Josie look at her. Paige lowers herself to the floor a few feet away, folding her dress beneath her knees.
Josie keeps one fist twisted in my shirt. After a full minute, her other hand reaches across the space between them.
Paige takes it and stays exactly where she is.
For several minutes, none of us moves. Josie’s fingers stay curled around Paige’s while I hold her against me.
After her breathing evens out, I ask, “Do you want to look at some pictures of Mommy?”
She gives a small nod against my shoulder.
I carry her to the couch and sit with her tucked against my side. Paige follows, then waits until Josie pats the cushion beside her before taking the offered spot.
My phone is still open to the useless braid tutorial. I close it and pull up the folder of pictures Krista sent over the years. There are hundreds of Josie eating, sleeping, grinning, wearing costumes, and displaying artwork I never understood without an explanation.
I used to look at these from wherever work had taken me and tell myself knowing what she did that day counted as being part of it. Looking at these now, I see the truth: getting a picture of her day was never the same as sharing it.
Josie swipes past a picture of herself in a purple tutu, then stops on one Krista took in a bathroom mirror. Josie is younger, with two neat braids joining at the back of her head. Krista’s face is half hidden behind the phone, but her smile is visible.
“That one.” Josie touches the screen. “That’s how she did it.”
“Okay.”
“Can you make it like that?”
I study the photo. It shows the finished braid and none of the steps that got it there. My instinct is to fix it: enlarge the photo, find a tutorial, solve the problem.
Josie needs something else from me.
“I can practice,” I tell her. “It might take me a few tries.”
Her mouth pulls down again. “Because you forgot too?”
“I never knew how she did this one.” I brush damp hair away from her cheek. “There are things I do forget, though.”
“Like what?”
“Sometimes I can remember that your mom laughed at something, but I can’t hear the exact sound of it. Then it comes back when I’m doing something else.”
Paige’s hand covers mine on the cushion.
“Does that mean you forgot Mommy?” Josie asks.
“No, baby. It means brains aren’t perfect.” I turn the phone so we can both see Krista’s smile. “Forgetting one sound or one song doesn’t erase your mom. You remember other pieces, and I remember pieces, and the people who loved her can tell you stories. It’s too much to hold by yourself.”
Josie considers that, her expression turning solemn—the same one she gets when deciding if a rule is worth breaking.
“She let me pick the hair ties,” she says. “Even if they didn’t match.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“She said matching was boring.”
That sounds like Krista. “Now I know because you told me.”
Josie looks at Paige. “Do you know an easy braid?”
“I know two regular ones,” Paige says. “They won’t join together, but your dad can watch me do them.”
“Can I have one pink hair tie and one purple?”
“I believe matching has already been ruled boring.”
Josie slides off my lap. “Daddy needs to watch really close.”
“I’m sitting right here.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re watching.”
The accusation is accurate, so it stings, but it’s also so ordinary I have to smile.
Paige finishes the braids while I watch every move. They are even; the elastics clash, and Josie approves after checking all three of our opinions in the window.
When she runs down the hall for her shoes, Paige turns to me.
“You’re good at this,” she says.
“I’m good at looking through my phone?”
“You let her feel it,” she says. “You didn’t look away when it got hard.”
“I wanted to fix it, to promise she’d remember everything.”
“I know.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You stayed anyway.”
A knot forms in my throat as I lift her hand and press my mouth to her knuckles.
“Thank you for staying too.”
“Josie asked me to.”
“I told you to go.”
“You were giving me a choice.”
“And you stayed.”
Paige holds my gaze. “For both of you.”
Josie returns wearing one sneaker and carrying the other. “Are we still going?”
“If you want to.”
“I do. Paige has to read the book.”
Paige collects her tote while I help Josie with the second shoe, and we leave fourteen minutes later than planned. The clock doesn’t matter.
Halfway to town, Josie leans between the front seats as far as her seat belt allows.
“Miss Paige?”
Paige turns toward her. “Yes?”
“Can I read the event book with you tonight? You can do the hard pages, and I can do the page with the owl.”
“I would love that,” Paige says. “Do I get to hold the book?”
Josie thinks it over. “We can both hold it.”
By the time Paige starts negotiating who gets to turn each page, Josie is smiling again.
By the time we get home, Josie is asleep against the back seat with her two braids still intact.
Paige opens the door while I unfasten Josie’s seat belt. She stirs when I lift her, mumbles something about the owl page, then settles against my shoulder.
“I’ll get the doors,” Paige whispers.
I carry Josie inside and change her into pajamas. She stays half-asleep. After I tuck her beneath the covers, I set my phone beside her long enough to show her the picture of Krista and those joined braids. Her eyes barely open, but she reminds me to print it tomorrow.
Paige is waiting on the porch when I come back, her green dress hidden beneath the cardigan she keeps in her tote for the library’s aggressive air-conditioning.
“How is she?” she asks.
“Out.”
“She did well tonight.”
“She had a good partner.”
Paige smiles, though it fades as she looks across the dark yard. I sit beside her on the porch swing and wait for her to find the words. She keeps her distance, leaning against the far arm of the swing.
“Can I ask you something? And can you promise not to give me the easy answer?”
“That depends on whether you ask me which braid looked better.”
“Aiden.”
“Yes.”
Her fingers tighten around the edge of her cardigan. “When you picture me in your life, do you see a partner, or do you see someone filling the space Krista left?”
The question lands like a stone. She has every right to ask it.
“I loved Krista,” I say. “We were young when we got married and had Josie. Then I spent too much of our marriage working.”
Paige stays quiet.
“I told myself I was building a life for them. Krista was living that life mostly alone. She divorced me when Josie was little, and she got primary custody because she was the parent who was there every day. I fought for more time, even though I knew why she’d won.”
“You’ve never told me that part so plainly.”
“I wasn’t the father I believed I was. Wanting more time with Josie didn’t mean I had earned it.”
Paige’s expression softens, but I don’t let it stop me.
“I changed after the divorce. Slowly at first, then because I got tired of making promises I couldn’t prove. By the last year, Krista trusted me again. We were friends. We had finally learned how to be good parents together, and we agreed Josie would spend more time here.”
“And Krista was bringing her things.”
I nod. “She was on that road because I wanted my daughter here. I know I couldn’t have stopped the accident. Some days, I still believe wanting more cost Josie her mother.”
Paige walks over and takes my hand. “Wanting your daughter didn’t cause the accident.”
“I know.”
“The truth you know and the truth you feel don’t always line up.”
“No. They’re stubborn assholes.”
Her thumb moves over my knuckles. “I’m not asking you to stop loving Krista.”
“Good, because part of me always will. She’s Josie’s mother. She was a good one, and she trusted me enough to help build the relationship I have with Josie now.”
“Then what am I?”
“The woman I want.”
She looks up at me.
“I don’t want someone to braid Josie’s hair, manage this house, or make us look whole.
Josie and I are already a family. I want you because you challenge me, make me laugh, and walk into a room like you already own it.
” I turn my hand beneath hers and lace our fingers.
“I want a partner, Paige. Specifically you.”
She closes the space between us, her knee pressing against mine. “I needed to hear that.”
“You can ask me again if you ever doubt it.”
“I’d rather you keep showing me.”
“That I can do.”
We sit together until the porch light begins attracting every moth in Colorado. When Paige finally stands, I rise with her.
“I can drive you home,” I say. “Or you can stay.”
Her gaze moves toward the house, then returns to me. “I’m staying.”
I take her hand and lead her inside.
In my bedroom, I give her a T-shirt and brush my teeth while she changes. When we climb beneath the covers, she comes to me without hesitation, fitting her back against my chest and pulling my arm around her waist.
I kiss her shoulder and hold her while the house goes quiet around us.
She chose tonight. I hold her close and refuse to imagine every night after it.