She walks over to the chair and Binh helps her up a step so she can sit down in it. It’s a big chair! Chairman of the board!
“Okay, we have to take off your shoes and socks,” Binh says. She pats her lap and Flo puts her Keds up there and Binh very gently takes off Flo’s shoes and socks and then slides her ugly old bumpy feet into the bubbly suds.
“Temperature okay?” Binh asks.
“Oh, yes, very comfortable. I feel like the Queen of Sheba.”
“Who is that?” Binh asks.
Flo stares at her. “You know what? I don’t really know. I’ve been saying that all my life and I don’t have any idea who the Queen of Sheba was.”
The woman in the middle chair in the row reads off her phone: “She was first mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. She gave King Solomon a whole bunch of gifts. Says here acaravanof gifts.”
“Huh!” Flo says.
“Massage?” Binh asks Flo, holding up a remote control.
Flo doesn’t quite know what she means.
“The chair massages you,” Binh says.
Flo turns around to look at the back of the chair. “Itdoes?”
“If you want.”
“Well, how much is it?”
“Oh, nothing! It’s free. Some people like it, but some people they don’t. Why don’t you try?”
So Flo says she’ll try it and Binh turns the chair on and Flo says, “Nope, nope, turn it off.” When Binh does, Flo says, “That chair would loosen my teeth if I sat there long enough!”
Binh laughs, a soft, bell-like laugh. “We can make it more gentle,” she says, and Flo says no, she’ll just have her pedicure plain.
“How about a cup of coffee?” Binh says. “Or herbal tea? Or lemon water?”
“For free?” Flo asks, and Binh says yes.Andshe can have a cookie.
“Lord!” Flo says, leaning back in the chair. “Well, then I’ll have a coffee and a cookie, too. I’d be a fool not to.”
Flo is given her coffee and cookie and the coffee is too strong but the cookie is right good, kind of like a pecan sandy, and she gobbles it up. Binh goes to the reception desk to take a payment and Flo sits still in her chair and looks around at everything: the TV on the wall showing a bunch of overly made-up women who look like they’re having a catfight, the great number of colorful orchid plants stationed here and there throughout the salon, the rhinestone barrette one of the manicurists is wearing, the woman at the far endof the row of chairs who is engaged in a giggly conversation with the woman painting her toes.
“Magazine?” Binh asks when she returns, and Flo says, “Oh my, no. There is too much to see!”
Binh begins using a pumice stone on Flo’s feet and Lord does it tickle! Flo can’t keep from laughing out loud. But then comes a gentle foot massage and fragrant lotion and it is just wonderful. Flo closes her eyes and leans back in her chair and she hears Binh talking in Vietnamese to the manicurist next to her. Flo listens for a while, and then she opens her eyes and says, “Say, you’re not talking about me, are you?”
“No, no,” Binh says. She jabs a thumb toward the woman next to her. “We are talking about her kids.”
“Oh,” Flo says. “I was afraid you were talking about me.”
“No, we’re not doing that,” Binh says, and picks up one of Flo’s feet to gently dry it off.
“How do you say ‘feels good’ in your language?” Flo asks.
Binh says something and Flo says it back loudly and then all the women in the place have a laugh, including Flo. Well, she only wishes she’d known before how nice this place was.
After Flo’s pedicure is done, Binh puts some flip-flops on her and walks her over to the hair-washing station, where a young woman named Debby with a very loud voice washes her hair. Then she is escorted to the chair for hair coloring by Renee.
“What color are we doing today?” Renee asks.
