The Manicure

I had a friend while we lived in Gilbert who only had sons. She was a beautiful woman, but missed having daughters to dress up.

My friend's husband owned a construction company. He went to work very early in the morning, and often fell asleep on the couch at night long before she was ready to go to bed.

One evening, while her husband snored on the couch, my friend sat up watching TV, painting her fingernails.

“Nothing woke him up when he was sleeping,” she explained when she told me the story a few days later.

“I guess I was feeling kind of sorry for myself, not having any little girls to paint nails with, so I got this bright idea to practice on my husband.”

Very carefully, my friend painted each of her husbands nails a bright red. He never stirred.

The next morning, long before she woke up, her husband quietly got dressed in the semi-darkness and slipped out the door so as not to wake his wife. It wasn't until he pulled out his wallet to pay for a Big Gulp at Circle K that he saw the bright red paint on his fingernails. It was hard to tell who was more astonished, him, or the cute little girl behind the counter. She certainly never expected to see a big, hulk of a man like that wearing nail polish.

My friend's husband sure was cross when he got home that afternoon. Wearing gloves all day in 105 degree weather wasn't fun, but it was the only way to keep his employees from seeing his manicure.

“How do you get this stuff off?” he grumbled, after he'd used a whole bottle of rubbing alcohol to no avail.

“Oh, it usually just wear off my fingers in about a week,” my friend assured him with a twinkle in her eye. It did, too, and she never told him about the bottle of polish remover sitting in her medicine cabinet, next to the nail polish. “After all, it kept him from drinking soda pop for a whole week.,” she told me.