It started with a lie. A lie that jumped out of her mouth before her head and her heart could agree on a suitable truthful answer.
It was a small, innocent question – chit-chat really. He was holding her hand, as he had many, many times before. A cooking show was on the TV mounted high on the back wall. It was the only time she watched cooking shows, and she always went home hungry. Sometimes she brought a book to read, but not that day. That day she knew she couldn’t focus on a book; grief will do that to you.
It was a small, modest nail salon. Strip mall. Between a laundromat and a Baskin-Robbins. It was a nail salon like countless other nail salons. Tight rows of nail polish bottles mounted on the walls. So many choices, hard decisions. Orchids in pots, some blooming, some dormant, crowded and vying for attention on the counter by the cash register, the cup of mismatched pens, a tiny box of business cards. There was a glass candy bowl, always half-full. Tootsie Rolls and LifeSavers. Waiting in the same spot year after year for chubby little fingers to pluck out a favorite.
The man holding her hand was Vietnamese, a small tidy man with an easy smile and quick, gentle hands. Brisk swipes of the nail file, white dust, whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk.
“Where your daughter today?”
She knew this might happen. She had tried and failed to prepare an answer in advance. She hated pop quizzes. And in that moment, the lie came so easily, felt truer than the truth.
“She’s at home, working on a school project.”
“She no come for nails today?
“No, not today.”
And for the next hour, it seemed true. She was here and her daughter was home, and believing that for an hour was heaven.
Nails grow and need tending. They have a mind of their own. And so, as she had for years, she went back. Two weeks. Three weeks. Sometimes she read a book and there were no questions. Other times, there was no book, leaving space for polite conversation.
It was like grade-school magic how once the first lie was told, the others flowed seamlessly one after another, a procession of silk scarves tied end to end, pulled effortlessly from up a sleeve. Easy deception. Ta-dah!
Little by little, over months and years, her daughter learned to drive, had her first boyfriend, then others, got her first job, then others, graduated high school, and moved away to college. One lie at a time, the life that might have been was built. Awkward at first. She wondered if she should tell him. But to what end? The nail salon and this kind man were a perfect, tiny bubble, floating alongside reality. Every couple of weeks, she stepped into the bubble and for an hour, her daughter was alive again, if only in the short answer to a casual question.
“Oh yes, she’s coming home soon.”
Renee Writes 