PART 2 — ONE PURPLE THUMBNAIL
Friday evenings had once been the quietest part of my week.
Elena worked twelve-hour shifts in the emergency department, and Sofia stayed with me inside the house or garage. I made dinner. She completed homework. We watched something selected through a long negotiation in which my opinion carried no weight.
Sofia liked accompanying me into the garage, but she disliked motorcycle noise. I gave her hearing protection and created a safe corner beyond the repair area with a desk, books, and art supplies.
That corner gradually filled with nail polish.
At first, she practiced on plastic hands and dolls. Elena bought water-based polish because Sofia had sensitive skin, and I installed a small fan to keep air moving.
I never asked to become a customer.
One Friday, Sofia carried her supplies to the kitchen table and examined my hands. My knuckles were scarred. Grease remained embedded near two nails despite repeated scrubbing. Tattoos covered the backs of both hands.
“I need a real person.”
“Ask your mother tomorrow.”
“She moves.”
“I also move.”
“You’re slower.”
She placed a towel beneath my left hand.
I withdrew it.
“No.”
“Why?”
“I have work tomorrow.”
“You work with men who have snakes tattooed on their faces.”
“One man.”
“Does he hate purple?”
I looked toward her.
Sofia had inherited Elena’s ability to make a question sound like evidence.
“It’s not about hating purple.”
“Then what?”
I had no respectable answer.
I grew up in a house where my father believed fathers provided money, repaired broken things, and kept private feelings private. He had never sat on the floor to play with me. I could not remember him asking what colors I liked.
At twenty, I placed a snake tattoo across my face because I wanted people to see the threat before they could notice the frightened kid carrying it.
Years later, I still had rules inside my head that belonged to men I no longer respected.
Sofia waited.
I placed my hand back on the towel.
“One nail.”
She chose my thumbnail.
The polish went on unevenly. She flooded the edge, wiped it, and started again. When she finished, she lifted my hand beneath the kitchen light.
“Purple suits the snake.”
I wore it to work Saturday.
Mack noticed immediately.
“What happened to you?”
“Appointment.”
“With who?”
“My stylist.”
The club laughed. I allowed it because Sofia’s pride mattered more than their opinions. When one rider offered polish remover, I pushed it back across the table.
By lunch, Mack had stopped joking.
His daughter Lila visited the shop that afternoon. She saw the purple thumbnail and asked who had painted it.
“Sofia.”
Lila looked at her father.
“Would you let me?”
Mack pretended not to hear.
I saw his expression.
Rebecca, his late wife, had handled the parts of parenting Mack feared doing incorrectly. Hair, clothes, school friendships, birthdays. After she died, he tried to reproduce her routines without understanding the conversations that had filled them.
“Friday,” I told Lila. “Bring blue.”
That was how the second chair entered my garage.