The slender young Vietnamese woman tugged my hand forward, forcing my gaze back toward her where she was trying to cut my cuticles. I had been staring at my father, who was getting his feet massaged in a pedicure chair to my left and a little behind me. His blue eyes were closed and his expression was one of utter bliss, just like that of my dog’s when I scratched her belly. I was grateful he could enjoy this moment in the shit storm his life had become.
Earlier the pedicurist, Ton (my father had asked his name), had deftly cut and filed my dad’s thick horny toenails. Even as a child, I remembered them being yellowed and curving, in ugly prehistoric contrast to my father’s dark handsomeness. Now Ton held what looked like a cheese grater in his gloved hands, and to my horror began to swipe it across the callouses on my dad’s feet. My father’s blood was thin from chemo and I worried the sharpness of the utensil might start blood flowing that would never stop. When Ton put down the grater and picked up a pumice stone, I exhaled in relief and then turned back around to inspect my own short and peeling nails. I had picked off most of the gel polish a few days before in a moment of nervous agitation, but putty-colored stains still stubbornly clung to the creases. The manicurist was trying to buff them smooth, but the damage was done. I hoped my father’s blood was stronger than my nails. The sound of his giggle pulled my attention back to his chair, where he was involuntarily jerking his foot away from Ton’s hand holding the pumice stone. He had always been ticklish. “Sorry, sorry,” he apologized sheepishly to Ton. My dad caught my eye and gave me a big grin. “Ton owns this place with his wife and sister!” he said loudly, somehow proudly, from across the salon. “They’re from Danang!”
I smiled back at him, nodding. I had overheard him earlier asking Ton questions about the business, then happily reporting that he and my mother had been to Vietnam. My dad had never been inside a nail salon before and it figured that he would be fascinated. He hadn’t lost his curiosity for people’s stories with age, or his ability to ferret them out. It was a quality I admired now, though once it had embarrassed me. He could talk to anyone, in any circumstance, and often ended up helping people that he met. Like the busboy at the Mexican restaurant we used to frequent who had gone to community college at my father’s urging. Or the woman who worked at my dad’s office who couldn’t get a mortgage so he introduced her to his private banker. And the times he left me on the tennis court where we were hitting to help the person on the court next to us (his coaching was compulsive) with whatever stroke was offending his sensibilities. My emotions would fluctuate between mortification and jealousy in those moments. But I realized when I got older that he just liked helping people, and he loved sharing their stories. I learned storytelling from him.
Tears filled my eyes like water rising in a tank as the manicurist firmly massaged my hands, her therapeutic touch melting the thin sheet of ice I had frozen around my heart to protect it. I blinked carefully so the tears wouldn’t spill and swallowed them, wishing I could apply nail polish to harden my heart as easily as the young Vietnamese woman did to my nails. I wasn’t ready to lose my dad.
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