With the New Mexico Covid-19 numbers being at their lowest, we grabbed the window of opportunity to have the Queen’s nails done. As her PA, I do not have the guts, patience, protective gear, nor the right tools to approach her now pre-historic looking digits in order for both of us to come out with our relationship and her toes intact AND beautiful.
We reached the entrance to the salon, waited, and then the owner came to the door to let us in.
“Hello again! The old woman is back!” Mom shouted at the tall and lean Vietnamese man.
“Hello. Come in.” His eyes were either happy or filled with dread. I couldn’t tell without seeing his full face behind his mask.
“Okay, so what do I do?” said Mom, edging her 4-wheel walker towards the aisle.
“Pop on your brakes and carefully sit on your seat,” I said.
“Pedicure?” he asked.
“Just a pedicure and manicure for my mom. Thanks.”
“Choose your color, please,” he said, before heading towards the end of the row of lounge chairs at the rear of the salon.
“I just want plain. Don’t bring me anything fancy.” The Queen hath spoken.
“Yes, ma. But it is a nail salon, so there aren’t a hundred shades of vanilla.”
“Ja, ja. Don’t be a smart aleck.”
I chose a metallic pearl white color, and we headed to where the man was filling two basins.
“Oh sorry, sir, it’s just one pedicure. My mom,”
“Okay.”
“Actually, maybe it’s a sign. Okay, go ahead. We’ll both have our feet done.”
“Okay Mom, that’s good. Plop yourself in the last chair. We can park your walker next to you.”
“One, two, three, up she goes.” The Queen landed in her temporary throne.
“Now please try not to touch anything, especially your face. Keep your mask on. Here’s your bag and your water bottle.” I walked around to my seat.
“Thank you.” She slid her bare feet into the basin. “Aah, this is such luxury!”
“Well, it’s more like a necessity at this stage.”
The “festivities” began.
“Oh, be careful! I hurt those toes a few weeks ago, and both legs are dead from here down,” Mom gestured from her knees.
“Okay, just relax,” the man said.
“Just relax, Mom. It’ll be good. He’s good.”
“Okay, I’ll try. Thank you, good man. Aaah. So, let me finish telling you what else your sister said this morning on the phone. She said that when Tammy visited South Africa, and she went to your father’s plaque on the wall at Corpus Christi’s Memorial Garden, there was no more room for plaques. So, I won’t be with your father.”
“Huh. Guess no more room at the inn for more corpses!”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
Mom went on. “Then she asked me where else you girls could lay my ashes.”
“Wow. I didn’t think we needed to look at another place. I always saw you next to dad.”
Mom flinched.
“Sorry Ma, but just let him get under your nails. It’s just for a short time. Long term gain! It’s something they have to do, because I can’t do it.”
“I know. Maybe to save you a trip to SA you can simply throw me to the wind!”
“Not quite. I’d prefer to know where you’d like to go, then I’m guaranteed of you not haunting us.”
She grins. “Okay, then how about at the base of the Sandias?”
“That’s a thought. But how would you feel about the monastery instead?”
“Yes! Oh yes! That would be perfect.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I forgot about the monastery. That would be lovely.”
“I mean in a way, Dad’s spirit has always been a part of New Mexico, too. You’d be together in a different way.”
Mom looked down at her good man. “Oh, thank you,” Mom smiled as he massaged her calves. “See, he’s bringing the one leg back to life. As your grandmother used to say: I’m old but not cold.”
“Yup, not dead yet!”
“Thank you, good man. You’re very kind to little old ladies.”
“I think she wants to marry you,” I said to the man.
He muffles a laughter behind his mask.
I waved for his attention and said, “my marriage advice to you? RUN!”
“Isn’t that the truth!” Mom laughed.
“Okay, put your hands here,” he said to Mom, guiding her right hand into the little glass bowl filled with warm water.
“Just the one hand, Mom.”
“Oh, just the one hand. Sorry, this other hand doesn’t work properly.”
“Yes, it does,” I go on. “She had a stroke that affects her balance and co-ordination of her left arm and hand. It makes her hand shaky.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “When you young, you drink a lot.”
“Wow. He can tell or is he asking you?”
“How did you know?” Mom chuckles. “But not now since my stroke. When I was young, yes, but I didn’t drink a lot at a time. I’d have a drink or two when I was out a lot. Vodka and orange juice.”
“I see,” he said.
“She had a lot of boyfriends,” I said.
“Oh shoosh.”
“Yes, she stroked many men in her time,” I said as I rested my hand on her left hand.
A customer opposite laughed.
“I’ll give you sommer a klap! Now the whole world knows!”
“Okay ladies, let these dry before you get up,” my pedicurist said to me.
“Thank you so much. My feet feel so much lighter without all that dead skin you had to blow torch.”
We’re heading back up the aisle, and as we get to the last in the row of pedicure chairs, a customer looks up from her magazine.
“I thought I recognized your voice, Pearl.”
“Well I never! Joan! How are you?” Mom halted in her tracks. She turned to me. “This is Joan from the Bible study I used to go to.”
Well, a small part of the world now knows.
I do love these conversations you have with Pearl. I can just hear her.
Thanks Aroon. She misses going out more frequently and she misses her dear friends, like you.