Some of the nervous tension returns to my stomach, and I shoot a glance back at Micah.
“Don’t worry. She’s been practicing.” He points to the living room, which seems to have been hit by a tornado of dolls with various stages of braids in their hair. I take comfort in the fact that all the dolls appear to stillhavehair, though some of it has been brushed to within an inch of existence.
“Oh. Great.”
Hailey beams, and I lose any resistance I had to letting her touch my hair. She looks so proud! How can I take that away from her by saying “No”?
Micah’s takeout breakfast ends up being simple glazed donuts with some gourmet coffee from a local bakery. The donuts are delicious, if messy, and I make sure Hailey washes her hands before she starts in on my hair.
To make things easier for Hailey, I sit on the floor in front of the couch while she takes a spot on the cushion behind me. I bite my lip as she jams the brush against my skull and rakes it through my hair. Gentle she’s not, but I keep myself from grunting in pain. Behind me, I hear Micah whispering instructions as Hailey starts to separate my hair into strands for braiding. Her touch with the strands is slightly lighter than with the brush, and I relax a bit as she settles into a surprisingly even rhythm with it.
When she’s done, Micah talks her through securing it with a hair tie. She pulls a little too hard on the braid, but again I restrain from crying out. Finally, I hear a phone camera click behind me, and I pray Micah hasn’t just recorded my embarrassment for posterity.
He holds the phone in front of me for my inspection, and to my surprise, it’s a braid! It’s just about as lumpy and misshapen as my own first attempt on Hailey’s hair, but it’s not the worst in the world. I decide to leave it in until Hailey goes to bed—if it deigns to stay put, that is.
“Okay, Miss Iris, now do my hair!” Hailey jumps off the couch and climbs into my lap before I have a chance to object.
I try to be gentler with the brush than she was, and she sits still like a champ while I work my way through the new skill. Brush. Separate. Left over middle, under right. My fingers still fumble through the motions, not as deft as Micah’s when he braided my hair, but before long I’m taking the hair tie from him and wrapping it around the bottom of the braid. It’s straighter than my first attempt, more even, and I actually feel a little proud that I remembered enough to accomplish it.
“Take a picture, Miss Iris! I wanna see it!”
I do as she asks and show her the final result.
“Ooh! Thank you, Miss Iris. Now we’re twins!”
A smile spreads my lips, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch Micah grinning, too. He takes his phone and snaps a picture of the two of us, then taps at the screen a few times before showing us his new home screen.
“There. My two girls, right there any time I look at my phone. Now I have you both with me wherever I go.”
I blush a bit at him calling me one of his girls. It’s sweet.
“Daddy, can you take a selfie with all of us?”
“Sure. Get up on the couch here. You, too, Iris. You heard her. She wants a family photo.”
Hailey climbs into Micah’s lap, and I sit next to him, snuggling close so we’ll all fit in the picture. Micah holds the camera out and up, getting the best angle, and I can’t help but giggle when he tells us to say “cheese.”
The photo is beautiful. He manages to catch just the right lighting, with the sunlight streaming in from the living room window, making us all seem to glow. Despite the stray strands sticking out of both my and Hailey’s braids, it’s almost idyllic. I can easily see this picture as a postcard or greeting card.
“Micah, can you send that to me? I want a copy.”
He taps at the screen again, and my phone pings with the receipt of the image. I save it and set it as my background, replacing the picture with just Micah and me. A new type of fluttering starts in my gut, an excitement that has me a bit giddy. A family photo. I don’t know how to feel about that. We’ve only known each other a couple of weeks, but Micah’s right. It feels like a family.
Hailey moves from Micah’s lap to mine to better see my phone. She grins and gives me a hug, resting her head on my chest. Micah reaches around me to put his arm on my shoulder, pulling me close to him.
“This is nice,” I say with a contented sigh.
“Yeah.” Micah lets out a sigh of his own. “But it can’t last forever. Today is the day you learn all about Hailey’s schedule, and today she has to work on her words.”
“Da-ad!” She somehow turns the word into two syllables. “I wanna play.”
Micah picks up his notebook. “Words first. Then playing.”
Hailey grumbles as she gets up and crosses the room, grabbing a pencil and a workbook of some kind. I’m surprised he’s got her doing what amounts to homework when she’s just four, but what do I know?
Almost as if he read my mind, Micah starts explaining. “Since Lisa’s death affected her so much, I took her out of preschool. I didn’t want her getting behind, though, so I try to teach her the same stuff here at home. Next year when she starts kindergarten, I want to be sure she knows the basics of reading and writing, a little bit of adding and subtraction. Kids these days are pushed too damn far if you ask me, but it’s not going to hurt her to learn some of this now.”
“I didn’t realize preschool was so serious. I thought it was just a place to drop your kids off for arts and crafts before they started regular school.”
