Apron Strings

Mai had been doing nails for nineteen years and she could tell a walk-in from a regular from the parking lot through the front window, which was why she already knew something was wrong when the big man in the green jacket stood at the door for a full minute like he was rehearsing a speech. She looked away before he came in, back to her station, back to Mrs. Garza's set of almond tips, and she told herself whatever it was it had nothing to do with her.

It had everything to do with her.

"Okay, Mrs. Garza, pick your color and I'll be right back," she said, and she was already walking to the front desk where Annika stood holding the tablet with a face on her like she'd swallowed a fly.

"So," Annika said, quiet, tilting the screen so only Mai could see it. "Client named Darrin. Darrin Mills. Three forty-five manicure, booked online last night at eleven pm."

"So?"

"So look at the phone number on the booking, honey. Look at it real good."

Mai looked. She knew that number. She had known that number three years ago, back when she was thirty-nine and stupid and in love, and she had spent one whole night two years ago talking herself out of deleting it, and then one whole different night actually deleting it, so how she still knew it was anybody's guess. Her stomach did something she refused to name.

"You can kick him out," Annika said. "Say the word and I'll tell him we're booked solid until June. I'll tell him we're booked until the heat death of the sun."

"No!" Mai straightened her apron, because her apron was the one thing in her life she kept perfect, crisp white, pressed every Sunday, her name stitched on the pocket in pink thread she'd done herself. "No, we take his money like anybody's. This is a place of business. He wants a manicure, he gets a manicure."

"Mai."

"What. It's fine. It's been three years, Annika. I'm forty-two years old, I'm not going to fall apart over some guy in a bad green jacket."

Annika gave her the look, the seven-years-of-friendship look, the one that said I was there when you cried into a bottle of pinot at my kitchen table and I remember everything. "I'm just saying I got your back."

"I know you do." Mai went back to her station and she did not look at the door and then she looked at the door anyway.

Ross had gotten old, was the first thing she thought, and then she corrected herself, he hadn't gotten old, he'd gotten real, the softness around his jaw, the gray coming in at his temples, forty-four sitting on him like a coat he'd finally stopped fighting. He used to be a chef and he still had the forearms, and she hated that she noticed the forearms. He saw her and his whole face did a thing, went bright and then scared, like he was walking into a surprise party he'd thrown for himself.

"Mai," he said.

"Darrin," she said. "Welcome to Lacquered. You can hang your coat."

"Mai, come on."

"Darrin Mills booked a manicure at three forty-five. I don't know any Darrin Mills. You want the manicure or not, because I have a client due at four and I don't have all day to stand here."

He hung the coat. Good, she thought, at least he can still take an instruction. She sat him down at her station and took his hands without asking herself whether she wanted to touch him, because a client's hands are just hands, that was the rule, that had been her rule for nineteen years and she was not going to break it for this man.

His nails were a disaster. Bitten down on two fingers, ridged, one hangnail he'd clearly been worrying at for days.

"Chef's hands," she said, before she could stop herself. "Oh wait. No. You don't do that anymore, do you."

"No," he said. "Two years now. I teach the night class at the community kitchen on Wednesdays."

"Wonderful for you."

She started filing, and the little rasp of the board was the only sound for a while, and she let it be the only sound, because filing was the part of the job where she didn't have to talk, and right now she would pay money not to talk. But he was sitting there with his ruined nails in her hands and his eyes doing that steady thing they always did, and finally he said her name again, just her name, quiet, like it cost him something.

"Ross."

"I need to tell you some stuff," he said. "And you don't have to say anything back. You can just file, you're good at it, I can tell you're good at it even when you're mad."

"I'm not mad. I'm working."

"Okay. You're working." He took a breath and she felt it in his hand, his fingers twitching in hers. "I've been seeing a therapist. Every week, going on three years, since about four months after I walked out on you, which, yeah, I know the timeline, I know what it says about me that it took four months. Dr. Ferreira, she's the one who finally got it through my head that what I did wasn't me being careful, it was me being a coward."

Mai kept filing. Her chest was doing things she refused to name, plural, several things, an entire committee of things.

"She helped me figure out that I didn't leave because of you," he went on. "I left because I panicked, because I built you up so big in my head that finding out you had a past, a whole life before me, felt like the ground moving, and instead of dealing with that like a grown man I drove home in the rain and I let my phone ring out. That's the short version. There's a longer version, it took two years of Thursdays, you don't want the longer version."

"Ross, stop!" She set the file down. "You can't do this here. You can't book under a fake name and come into my shop and do this here. I've got six stations going, I've got Mrs. Garza over there picking between two pinks, this is my floor, I run this floor, and you don't get to turn it into your therapy session."

"Then I'll book the longer version," he said. "Dinner. Somewhere you pick, anywhere you pick, I'll eat whatever you put in front of me, I'll be quiet and I'll listen and if at the end of it you tell me to get lost, I'll get lost and I won't bother you again, I swear it on the class I teach."

She picked the file back up, because her hands needed something to do that wasn't shaking. She thought about that night three years ago, the kitchen of the little apartment on Delancey, the way she'd finally said it out loud at age thirty-nine after six months of loving him, I'm trans, Ross, I told you because I want you to actually know me, and the way the silence after that had gone on so long she'd started setting the table just to have something to do with her hands, and then the sound of the door, and then nothing, no note, no call, three years of nothing until a fake name at eleven pm on a Tuesday.

She thought about how she'd wanted, still wanted, this exact man, and how mad that made her.

"Keep your hand still," she said. "You're wiggling."

"Sorry."

"And I'm not promising dinner. I'm saying I'll think about dinner. There's a difference."

"There's a difference," he agreed.

She shaped the nail on his index finger and hated how well his hand still fit in hers.

Annika appeared at the station with Mrs. Garza's top coat and a look on her face that Mai had known for seven years, the look that meant she'd been standing by the register listening to every word. She set the bottle down next to the UV lamp and said, "Mrs. Garza, Belinda can finish your top coat, she does a beautiful job," and just like that Mai's three o'clock was peeled off her hands and handed to someone else, and Mrs. Garza, who had finally settled on the lighter pink, went off with Belinda without a single complaint, which Mai would be hearing about later because Belinda charged two dollars more and everyone knew it.

"Mai," Annika said, low, in the voice she used for staff only. "You haven't taken your break. It's four o'clock. You're due."

"I don't want my break."

"You're due your break." Annika was already writing it on the schedule sheet, the big liar, pencil scratching away like the state of California demanded documentation. "Forty-five minutes. Back room. Mandatory, I don't make the rules." She did make the rules, she'd been making them for seven years, and she gave Mai a look on her way past that said everything and nothing, the look of a woman who had sat across a kitchen table with a bottle of pinot and watched her best friend cry into it over this exact man and was now, apparently, throwing her directly back into the water.

"I hate you," Mai muttered.

"No you don't. Go take your break!"

Ross was standing by the reception desk trying to make himself small, which was a trick for a man of forty-four with chef's shoulders, and Mai pointed at the beaded curtain in the back without a word and walked, because if she was going to be ambushed into a break she was at least going to get a cup of the good tea out of it. The back room was cramped and smelled like supplies, shelves of acetone and rows of towels and the big boxes of tips in every size stacked to the ceiling, and she was reaching for the electric kettle on the second shelf when she heard the curtain brush shut behind her.

"I know you didn't pay for a tour of the stockroom," she said, not turning around.

"I paid for a manicure. I got maybe half of one." He came up behind her, close, not touching, but close enough that she could feel the warmth off him, and she hated that too, she hated the whole inventory of things she hated about him, it was a long list and getting longer. "Mai. I'm not going to touch you. I just need you to turn around."

"You need a lot of things."

"I know."

She turned around, because forty-two years of being a woman who turns around had left her with no other setting, and there he was in the ugly overhead light with his bitten nails and his stupid steady eyes, and before she could get a word out he put one hand flat on the shelf beside her head, gently, nothing in it but asking, and leaned in until the shelf edge was pressed light against her back through the apron.

"Tell me to move," he said, "and I move."

"This is my place of business."

"This is your supply closet."

"It's a place of business." Her voice came out lower than she meant it to. "You walked out. Three years, Ross. You let my phone ring out in the rain and then three years of nothing, and now you book under the name Darrin Mills like