Imperial Flower Nails & Beauty

Fiction: A boy watches his mother at work.

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Mommy can be a real bitch sometimes.

Every time Bobby comes to Imperial Flower Nails & Beauty for an Imperial Deluxe Pedicure he brings Noah a Three Musketeers. Not just a tiny fun size bar, either. Mommy always takes it away if she can catch Noah first. He has to eat the whole thing right away, otherwise she takes it from him and throws it in the dumpster out back, the big one he’s too short to reach inside.

Sometimes Bobby brings Noah Hot Wheels, too. Mommy lets Noah keep those. Noah has a whole collection of little cars, now. He lines them up on the bookshelf next to his bed where he keeps his books and the Captain America action figures that he pretends to be too grown-up for.

Bobby slides out of his black Ford F-150 with a UVA baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. The salon is empty—it’s the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday, Imperial Flower’s slowest day—and the parking spaces right out front are all empty, but Bobby takes a spot at the other end of the lot. Noah can see him through the front windows if he cranes his neck. Bobby’s shoulders are hunched and he keeps looking over his shoulder like a spy in a movie trying to shake a tail. He pretends to read the menu taped to the front door of Pho 777. He always does.

“Mommy, Bobby’s here!” Noah shouts to the back of the store. Mommy and the new lady, Lily, are in the back office, sanitizing tools. Lily has been sleeping on a cot in the back since she started working here a few weeks ago. Her English is worse than Mommy’s, so it’s Noah’s job to welcome customers and translate when needed. Lily is younger than Mommy and all the other ladies who work here; she’s an agashi, not an ahjumma. Mommy says Noah can’t pull any pranks on Lily like he does with the ahjummas. She’s skinny and pale and gets dizzy a lot so Noah has to help her finish cleaning sometimes. It’s not fair, but when he helps sweep up the nail cuttings or wipe the perfumed soap scum and dead skin sloughings from the foot basins, she smiles at him from inside her sad face and somehow he doesn’t mind it too much.

Mommy sighs and sets a metal file down on the table. Noah listens to the tip-tap pitter-patter of her knock-off Uggs against the linoleum. He likes that sound. It’s the sound a bear paw would make, the rough skin of its paw-pads against the cool dusty floor. She stands next to him at the front desk and they both watch as Bobby pushes open the door and is transformed as he crosses the threshold: rounded shoulders roll back, soft chin lifts, scared eyes brighten.

“Hey kid! Think fast,” he says and tosses something shiny at Noah. He doesn’t react in time and something substantial hits him in the forehead. It’s a Three Musketeers! Noah grabs it and scrambles away before Mommy can confiscate the candy.

“Hi Mr. Bobby,” Mommy says. “We not see you in a while.”

She smiles sweetly at him and leads him to the oldest pedicure station, the one where the massage rollers poke out way too hard. See? What a bitch.

Mommy doesn’t like Bobby even though he’s nice to Noah and he’s a Good Tipper. Noah doesn’t like the way he ruffles his hair, but he brings him stuff and drives a big truck, so he figures Bobby’s alright. Mommy acts nice to him, but Noah can tell that it’s the fake kind of sweetness that means trouble. Bobby doesn’t seem to notice. He thinks she likes him.

Just as Bobby is pulling off his boots and Mommy is turning on the hot water for his soak, Lily comes out with a tray of sanitized tools. He stops, boot midair, and stares at her. He trembles like a dog smelling a steak.

“Who’s she? She new? She busy?” Bobby asks. Lily looks over at him, quickly breaks eye contact. She is straightening each bottle of nail polish in the front display with great care.

“No! No—she not train yet,” Mommy says.

Lily has been working for weeks. She hasn’t mastered nail art yet, but she can scrub a callous, trim a cuticle, and file a corn down with the best of them.

Bobby peels off his socks and settles back into the massage chair, flexing his hairy toes.

“Well, I guess that’s okay,” he says. “You are the master of foot massages. I mean, mistress.”

He rolls his baggy khakis up past his knees and dips his toes into the steaming water, frothy with soap and fragrant with lemongrass essential oil.

“It’s hot,” he says, and giggles, a strangely high-pitched sound issuing forth from his barrel-chested, lumbering body. His face is turning bright pink. Mommy fake laughs back at him.

“Yes, very very hot water,” she says, giggling like he’s just said something funny.

He submerges his feet. As he soaks, Mommy sneaks up on Noah, who is reading a book at the front desk and licking chocolate off of his fingers. She snatches the silver wrapper off of the desk but finds that the candy bar is all gone.

“Aiiiish—” she hisses. “Read your book closely! I want a book report at dinner, so pay close attention.”

She tosses the wrapper in the trash and returns to her stool, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. She hefts one of Bobby’s legs out of the water and starts scrubbing, rubbing, squeezing all the way from his toes to the arches of his feet and up his meaty calves. Noah’s feet tickle whenever someone touches them, so he doesn’t get it, but all the customers love this part of the procedure—and none more than Bobby. Noah turns back to his book, an adventure story about parallel universes, some that have magic and portals to other worlds.

As Mommy grinds her knuckle into Bobby’s instep, he puts his hands into the pockets of his pants and starts moving them, like he’s scratching an itch down there. But he doesn’t stop. He keeps scratching his itch. She kneads her thumbs into his calf and he starts breathing heavily. His face turns from pink to red. He’s enjoying the massage so much that he starts groaning a little under his breath.

Noah is startled to hear Lily gasp—everyone turns to look at her. She drops the nail file she was holding and says something real fast to Mommy that he can’t quite make out. Mommy snaps back at her: “Go-in-back-and-stay-there.” Lily scurries away, eyes big. Bobby watches her leave with a blank look on his face. His hands stop moving. Mommy takes a scoop of sugar scrub and works it into Bobby’s heel. His eyes move from the empty doorway back to the top of Mommy’s head. His hands start scratching himself again.

Noah gets bored and goes back to his book. Last year, his third grade teacher said he was reading at a fifth grade level, which is really good. Now that he’s going to be a fourth grader after this summer, he’s probably reading at a sixth grade level, which is middle school. He likes reading. It’s like he gets sucked in and can see it all in his head, even better than a movie. Lily thinks it’s cool that he reads so much, but he really doesn’t do it to impress anyone. Maybe just a little bit. He likes picking books with the thickest spines. This summer he even read a book that had over 500 pages in it. He likes it when grown-ups are surprised at the books he’s able to read. But he really does get absorbed in stories, so much so that he doesn’t notice how much time is passing until he hears Bobby clunking around in his boots and realizes that the pedicure is over. Mommy brushes past Noah to reach the cash register.

Bobby pulls out a wad of bills from one of his many pockets and counts out forty-five dollars onto the counter without looking at Noah or Mommy. That’s the price of the Imperial Deluxe Pedicure, the second-most expensive one. It comes with a sugar scrub, paraffin wax, and hot stone massage. He takes two twenty dollar bills and sets them down on top of the forty-five bucks. Then he looks at Mommy. She smiles at him with her big fake smile, the one that reminds Noah of a tiger shark. He smiles back and sets another twenty on the counter.

“That’s for the new girl,” he says. “I’ll come back for her when she’s trained up.” He winks at Noah.

Mommy stuffs the bills into the register and ushers him out the door.

“Okay, thank you, see you, thank you mister Bobby, see you next time!” she says, smiling so big her eyes disappear and Noah can see her gold fillings.

Mommy turns back to Noah. Her smile is gone.

“You have chocolate on your face,” she says, wiping it away with her rough thumb. “Clean out the tub and wipe down that chair, okay?” Then she tip-tap bear paw-pads her way back to the office and yells at Lily. Lily yells back. Noah has never heard her voice this loud before.

“He’s just a kid! You should have just kicked him out!” Lily says. “Or call the police. Don’t they have laws in this country?”

“A kid? A ‘kid’ his age was big enough to cause all of your problems,” Mommy says. “His uncle is a policeman. What do you want me to do?”

“Tell him… tell him your husband will beat him up.”

Mommy snorts. “He comes by enough to know there’s no men here.”

“Well, maybe you should find a man.”

“My problem is men. Your problem is men. Another man isn’t gonna solve that problem. You better learn that quick.”

Lily makes a disgusted noise.

“He’s not hurting anyone,” Mommy says. “And he’s a Good Tipper. He left a tip for you, too. You don’t want?”

They keep arguing for a while, but Noah is scrubbing the layer of grime and dead skin cells that Bobby left behind in the foot basin and he can’t make out their words over the shush-shush of the brush against the porcelain. He sprays the red faux leather massage chair with disinfectant and sneezes at the sharp rotten-lemon scent as he wipes it down with a rag.

Now that he knows Lily doesn’t like Bobby, either, he begins to reconsider the man he thought of as a friend. Most customers either ignore Noah or coo about how cute he is, which he loathes. Bobby is nice and doesn’t talk to him like he’s a baby. And he brings presents. But he keeps thinking about the way Bobby looked at Lily. It makes him angry, for some reason.

Noah finishes up and pushes the cleaning cart back into the office. Mommy is watching a k-drama on the computer and Lily is looking at her phone. Lily looks up when he walks in. She’s still flushed pink from the argument and her face looks pinched. When she sees Noah, she smiles. It’s like someone put earmuffs on him, because suddenly he doesn’t hear Mommy’s show or the cycling of the air conditioner or the Zen Spa Music Mix playlist and his ears feel all hot.

“Such a good son!” she says. “Noah’s mommy is so lucky. I hope you work as hard in school as you do in the salon.”

Noah grins. Mommy never says nice things like that.

“I don’t have to work that hard,” he says. “School is easy. I’m basically two grades ahead of everyone. But it’s summer break now, so I don’t have class until I start fourth grade next month.”

“You’re a smart boy,” Lily says. “Smart is good, but it’s no replacement for hard work. Don’t forget that.”

Noah spots Bobby’s truck driving by Imperial Flower a few times later that week while it’s busy with customers, but he doesn’t stop in. He drives by on the main road going ten under and Noah can see his face, like he’s looking across the parking lot and into the storefront. Like he’s looking for someone.

Bobby comes back on another slow afternoon. Noah is reading a comic book so he doesn’t notice him until he hears the door chime and Bobby is already inside the threshold, un-slumping his shoulders and squaring his jaw. He watches him unfold like some kind of flower blooming in time-lapse. He wears camo cargo shorts this time. His shins are all scabbed over.

“Mommy, Bobby’s here!” Noah calls. She’s somewhere in the back, probably watching another k-drama from the DVD store next to the Oriental Market. Lily is sweeping up in the corner.

“Hi, Bobby!” Noah says. “You wanna see my comic book? It’s Batman.”

Bobby doesn’t look at him. His eyes are locked on Lily. He takes a squished Three Musketeers from his pocket and tosses it in his general direction.

“Enjoy it, kiddo,” he says as the candy bar lands with smack on the floor three feet away from Noah. He looks at it, sees the oily fingerprints on the shiny wrapper. It doesn’t seem too appealing, right now.

Mommy comes out of the office and grabs Lily by the elbow. She flinches and drops the Swiffer. Mommy whispers something urgently in her ear, then shoves her car keys in her hand and rushes her past the pedicure stations, past the manicure tables, and past Bobby, who watches them pass him with his mouth agape. Lily steals a glance at Bobby and laughs—a hard, tinkling sound. Mommy pinches her arm even tighter, cutting her laughter short. Bobby’s mouth snaps shut and his brow furrows. Lily continues out the door and Mommy turns around to greet Bobby with a big smile on her face.

“Welcome, mister Bobby!” she says. “Come, come, please sit.”

“Hey, where’s the new girl going?” Bobby says. “I thought you said I could have her this time.”

“Oh, so sorry, very important errand,” she says. “Very important.” She guides him to the worst pedicure chair.

“Will she be back soon?” Bobby asks.

“Very important errand, far away,” Mommy says, smiling.

Bobby frowns and pulls off his boots as Mommy runs the water and draws up a stool. She checks to see if Noah is absorbed in his comics. After a while, Bobby puts his hands into his pockets and starts rubbing.

Noah looks at his comic book for a while, but the pictures and words don’t make any sense to him. After a while, he picks up the candy bar from the floor and puts it in the trash bin for receipts behind the register.

Bobby doesn’t leave a tip today.

The next time Noah sees Bobby, the salon is busy, a Saturday afternoon, and he’s translating a customer’s acrylic gel-fill request to Lily. This lady hasn’t been there before and she seems annoyed to be talking to a nine year old boy. Noah tries to talk her out of the coffin-shaped ombre with French tip because it’s not cool anymore and it’ll look tacky, but she insists, so he explains her demands to Lily in rudimentary Korean.

It’s a full staff roster today. Noah, Lily, and the customer are up at the manicure stations next to Vicky and Tina. Mommy, Rose, and Mimi are all giving pedicures. Sophie is doing a lash tint on the recliner in the corner, behind a folding plastic and polyester screen printed with cherry blossoms. Noah catches a glimpse of Bobby in his truck in front of the pho joint. He’s sitting there with his head in his hands, not moving, but Noah is kept busy running around the salon, bringing tissues and top coats and refilling cuticle serum dispensers, so he forgets that Bobby is there after a while.

Noah looks up when he hears the door chime, but for a moment he doesn’t recognize Bobby. His posture isn’t slouching and shy or puffed up and confident like he usually is in the salon. Instead, he’s in a sort of purposeful crouch. There’s a shiny black semi-automatic rifle in his hands. Its oiled body gleams under the buzzing fluorescents. On his hip is a six-shooter revolver with an inlaid mother-of-pearl handle in a leather holster. A cowboy’s gun. He’s here in a costume. Halloween in July.

The lady getting an ombre French manicure screams first. Lily’s head whips around to see what she’s screaming at, but before she can look, Bobby shoots her in the temple. She collapses forward into the dish of acetone solution that the lady’s fingertips are soaking in. The lady screams again. Her voice is as loud as a fire alarm. Bobby shoots her in the chest three times and she stops. All Noah hears is the Zen Spa Music Mix piping through the Bluetooth speakers and the mechanical whir of an abandoned massage chair.

Noah discovers that he’s on the floor, underneath the manicure table. He can’t tell if he’s been shot. Doesn’t think so. The drills in school worked. He sees the boots, the same stinky boots Bobby always wore, pacing next to him. He is swiveling, looking for his next target. He shoots into the corner a rapid burst of several rounds towards Sophie and the lady getting her lashes done.

“Please, please no,” Sophie whimpers. Must’ve shot the lady first. He fires again and Sophie stops whimpering.

Bobby’s boots plod back towards the pedicure stations. One of the massage chairs is still noisily running through its cycle. No legs are visible, so they must’ve all run into the back office. Mommy too. There’s another exit back there, a fire door that Vicky and Mimi prop open to smoke cigarettes. If they’ve all escaped, Bobby will come back to the front. Bobby will find Noah. Noah prays to God for Bobby to follow Mommy and the others out the back.

Noah realizes that he’s clinging to Lily’s slender shin under the table. She isn’t moving. A sharp, burning smell cuts through the usual acetone fumes. He thinks of Lily’s pretty, pale face half submerged in the nail polish remover bowl inches above his head. He thinks he’s going to be sick, he wants to bolt, but he forces himself to be as still as Lily.

Bobby’s footfalls pause. He’s most of the way to the back office, but he hesitates and doesn’t push back the polyester bamboo print curtains in the doorway. Mommy could be right behind that curtain. Or she could be in the ABC store next door, calling the police. Or she could even be a mile away by now, in the car, driving fast away from Noah. He wishes it were her here instead of him. Instead of Lily.

Bobby takes another step towards the rear doorway, and then Noah hears the thin wail of a police siren in the distance. Bobby freezes. He pivots on his heel and speed-walks past Noah to the front windows. He stands there a moment, listening to the sirens grow louder, and then stalks back to the middle of the salon, next to the manicure stations. Noah could reach out and grab his ankle if he wanted to. He lets the rifle hang loose from the shoulder strap. The tip of the barrel grazes the laminate tabletop. He puts a heavy hand on Lily’s shoulder, and Noah feels her body shift. He makes a strangled sound, something between a grunt and a sob.

With his other hand, Bobby pulls the revolver out of its holster. He fires it. He collapses down to where Noah can see him. The top of his skull is gone. A tiny curl of smoke escapes from the dime-sized hole in his chin.

Noah glues his eyes shut, clinging to Lily’s leg. If he stays still enough, everything bad will disappear. The sirens get louder and he wishes they would go away so he could stay frozen here forever.

Mommy hasn’t gone into the salon for weeks. The ahjummas from the church they infrequently attend raised some money to clean it up. Because it was on the news and on the internet, there’s a lot more money than they thought. So Mommy said screw the customers and screw the church; Imperial Flower is closed until further notice.

Mostly, she drinks pink wine from Costco and watches k-dramas all day. That, or she yells at Noah for not cleaning up the mess in his room. Sometimes Noah sits and watches the shows with her, but he can’t keep up with the storylines. They talk so fast and the subtitles don’t help much. The words go by so fast.

Tonight, Mommy passes out on the couch again. Noah sits in front of the TV for a while, letting the colors and sounds wash over him. After a while, he leaves her on the couch and gets ready for bed. At first, he used to try to get her into bed, but she’s too heavy and tugging at her dead weight just made him think of Lily. Instead, he takes the empty glass from her hand and covers her up with a blanket. He sets his clothes out on the foot of his bed and packs his backpack with notebooks, pencils, pens, and highlighters the church ahjummas brought for him. It’s the first day of fourth grade tomorrow.

The Hot Wheels Bobby gave him are still sitting on the bookshelf in Noah’s room. Sometimes he feels like they’re watching him. Like there’s a tiny little driver in a UVA hat behind the black windows in each little car. He doesn’t play with them anymore, but he’s afraid to throw them away. Something bad will happen if he does, he knows it to his core. He can’t explain. Doesn’t try to explain to Mommy.

Noah told the police about the Three Musketeers but he never told them about the Hot Wheels. Instinctively, he knew the Hot Wheels had to stay a secret. He couldn’t tell the cops. If he did, then they would know that he was a bad guy and they would take him away. They would know that he had prayed for Bobby to go after Mommy.

Some nights, Noah still prays that God will take Mommy and bring back Lily.

Mommy can be a real bitch sometimes.

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