Tina’s polish brush stopped in midair.
I couldn’t see the whole picture from where I was sitting, only the change that came over her face.
The caution disappeared first.
Then the professional little smile she wore with every customer vanished too.
She stared at Walker’s phone.
“Oh,” she said.
One word.
That was enough to make the salon quiet again.
Walker didn’t look around at any of us.
He kept his purple fingers spread carefully beneath the drying fan and watched Tina study the photograph.
I leaned sideways.
The picture showed a little girl in a hospital bed.
She looked about eight.
Her hair was pulled messily away from her face, and a blanket was tucked beneath her arms.
She was smiling despite the tiredness in her eyes, holding the same drawing Walker had shown Tina.
The purple hand.
The yellow stars.
Walker tapped the photograph gently.
“My granddaughter,” he said.
Nobody moved.
Tina looked from the little girl on the phone to the huge man sitting in the pink chair.
“She drew the nails?”
Walker nodded.
“She designed them.”
He said designed like it was a serious professional commission.
That almost made Tina smile, but something in his face stopped her.
“She’s been in the hospital?” I asked.
“Few days.”
His voice had lost some of its gravel.
He looked at the photograph again.
“She had surgery.
She’s doing all right, but she’s scared of pretty much everything in that place.”
He paused.
“Machines.
Nurses coming in at night.
Doors opening when she doesn’t know who’s behind them.”
His eyes moved toward his own hands.
“I know something about looking tougher than you feel.”
No one laughed at that either.
Walker told us the drawing had been made the night before.
His granddaughter had been restless and frightened, and he had been trying to distract her.
He wasn’t good at hospital talk.
He didn’t know what to say when she asked questions he couldn’t answer.
He couldn’t promise that nothing would hurt.
He couldn’t promise exactly when she would go home.
So he had done what he could.
He had sat beside her bed and let her tell him what to do.
She had taken a sheet of paper and traced her hand.
Then she colored the nails purple.
Not regular purple, she had explained.
Princess purple.
And they needed stars.
Walker had apparently made the mistake of telling her that nobody was ever getting purple polish anywhere near his hands.
That was when she looked at him and said, “Then maybe you’re not as brave as me.”
Tina laughed softly.
Walker’s beard shifted with the beginning of a smile.
