My wife was four hours late coming home and her phone went straight to voicemail, so I checked her location on our tracking app — but when I drove there and saw what she was doing, I completely forgot how to breathe.
And the count is at sixty-six.
Five since the November of last year.
And the plait, which I did do something about, and which is the only practical contribution I have made to any of this.
In the December I learned how to do one.
Off videos, badly, over about five weeks, on a hairdressing head I bought secondhand for eleven dollars and kept in the garage like a lunatic.
And then on Rosa, who was six and thought it was hilarious and charged me a biscuit per attempt.
And in the February I told Sorcha I could do it now.
And she cried, which she had not done at any point in the entire three weeks, and then she got extremely cross with me for about a minute, and then she asked me to show her.
I taught my wife to do a French plait at a kitchen table on a Tuesday evening and it took her about forty minutes because she is better with her hands than I am.
She has used it four times since.
And I know that because she tells me — not that there was one, she does not do that, but afterwards, in the car, she will occasionally say “plait” and nothing else.
And I say right, and we drive home.
And the last thing.
She showed me the diary in the December, at the kitchen table, and it is exactly what she said it was. A page at the back with lines on it in pencil, in groups of five, nothing else.
And I sat there and looked at sixty-one lines and could not think of a single useful thing to say.
And what came out of my mouth — and I did not plan it — was: “Can I do it?”
And she said what.
And I said the counting. Can I be the one who writes it down.
And she looked at me for a bit and then she pushed it across the table.
So that is my job now.
She comes in, somewhere between ten at night and two in the morning. She does not say anything. She puts the kettle on.
And I go and get that diary out of the drawer and put one more line in it in pencil, and put it back, and make the tea.
And that is the entire extent of what I do. I drive a car and I draw a line.
And it has taken me two years to understand that it is not nothing.
