“My nails are painted.” She holds up her hands. They are, in fact, painted, a dark glittery purple that’s chipped at the edges and applied with the precision of someone who has not yet mastered fine motor skills. “Do you have nail polish?”
He does not have nail polish. He has never in his life had nail polish. But there’s a look on her face, half hopeful and halfbraced for disappointment, and the bracing is the part that gets him. It’s the look of a child who has learned to pre-empt the no, who has been told no enough times about enough things that she’s built the rejection into the asking, and Sidney is not in the business of disappointing children who’ve had the kind of day Penny has had.
“Give me one second,” he says.
He goes to the front door, opens it, and crosses the hall to 4B. Mrs. Watts answers on the second knock, housecoat on and reading glasses perched on her nose, and gives him the look she always gives him when he shows up at her door at unreasonable hours, which is a mixture of fondness and exasperation and the tolerance reserved for neighbors who are strange but harmless.
“Sidney. It’s midnight.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Do you have nail polish?”
She stares at him. “Nail polish.”
“Preferably pink.”
Mrs. Watts looks at him for a long moment, the kind of moment where she is clearly deciding whether to ask questions and deciding against it, and then she disappears into her apartment and returns with a small bottle of hot pink nail polish that has probably been in a bathroom drawer since the early 2000s. She holds it out to him.
“Thank you,” he says. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“You’re a strange boy, Sidney.”
“I’ve been told.”
He brings the nail polish back to the apartment and presents it to Penny, who receives it with the gravity of someone being handed a sacred artifact. She examines the color. Holds it up to the light. Turns it over. Gives an approving nod that contains the full weight of her expertise.
“Sit on the floor,” she instructs.
Sidney sits on the floor. He extends his bare feet toward her because he’d kicked off his shoes the moment they walked in, and Penny slides off the couch and settles cross-legged in front of him with the focus and determination of a surgeon preparing for a complex operation. She unscrews the cap, pulls out the brush, examines the brush, deems it acceptable, and begins painting his big toe with the kind of intense concentration that suggests she believes this is the most important thing happening in the world right now.
She is not good at this. The polish goes on his toe, and also on the skin around his toe, and a little bit on the floor, and Sidney watches her work and doesn’t say a word. He sits there with his feet in the hands of a five-year-old girl he met two hours ago and lets her paint his toenails hot pink with the careful, devoted attention of someone who has finally found a task worthy of her abilities.
“You have to stay still,” she tells him.
“I’m not moving.”
“Your toes are moving. Tell them to stop.”
He tells his toes to stop. They don’t, but Penny seems satisfied with the effort and continues her work. She does all ten, taking her time, going back over the ones she’s not happy with, blowing on them with little puffs of breath that tickle and make him twitch, which makes her scowl and tell him to hold still again. By the time she’s done his toenails are a splotchy, uneven, deeply committed shade of hot pink, and there’s polish on the hardwood and on the edge of the blanket and on two of Penny’s fingers, and Sidney looks down at his feet and finds that he doesn’t mind at all.
“What do you think?” she asks, sitting back on her heels.
“I think you’ve got a future in the beauty industry.”
She beams at him. It’s the first real smile he’s seen from her all night, full and unguarded and radiant in the way thatonly children’s smiles can be, and it cracks something open in Sidney’s chest that he wasn’t expecting. The smile is enormous. It takes up her whole face, rearranges her features, makes the dark eyes bright and the fuchsia bows ridiculous and the chipped purple nails perfect, and Sidney has to look away for a second because the tightness in his chest has caught him off guard and he doesn’t want her to see whatever is happening on his face.
“Pink is so beautiful,” she says, with emphasis.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s my favorite.”
“I thought your favorite was purple.” He nods at her own nails.
“I have two favorites.”
She climbs back up onto the couch, satisfied with her work, and Sidney stays on the floor with his back against the couch and his pink toenails drying on the hardwood. The TV is still going, some new cartoon now with a lot of singing, and Penny is getting drowsy again. Her head tips sideways against the armrest and her eyes are fighting to stay open and losing.
“Sid?”
