What Y'all Know About

I been in my chair since ten-thirty.

Yvette already done my hands. Pink this week, the soft kind, not the loud kind, because I felt like being quiet. She’s doing somebody’s feet now. Girl named Aisha, lives over on Beauregard. Pretty girl. Talks too much. But that’s not my business.

Three of them came in together around eleven. College girls. Or maybe they finished college, I don’t keep up. The kind of girls who walk in already laughing about something. They sat down at the back and started talking about some man one of them was seeing. I wasn’t trying to listen. You can’t help what you hear when you’re sitting four feet from somebody.

The middle one said something about how he just don’t communicate. Like, at all.

The other two went mm-hmm.

I let out a little breath. Not loud. Just enough.

Yvette caught it. She always catches it. She didn’t look up from Aisha’s feet, but I saw the corner of her mouth.

The middle girl said, “And his mama be defending him too. Like, ma’am? Your son is grown.”

I chuckled.

That one I let them hear.

The girl turned around. “Miss Magda, what?”

I said, “Nothing, baby. Go on.”

She narrowed her eyes at me the way you do when you know somebody’s holding something. “Nuh-uh. What?”

I let it sit a second.

Then I said, “His mama ain’t defending him. His mama is tired.”

All three of them got quiet.

I said, “That woman raised that boy by herself for twenty-something years and she ain’t got nothing left to give. When you tell her her son ain’t communicating, she hearing you say he ain’t finished yet. And she finished a long time ago. So she defending the part of her that’s done. Not him.”

The middle girl opened her mouth and closed it.

Yvette said, “Mm,” still not looking up.

I said, “Now. That don’t mean you stay with him. I’m just telling you what you walking into.”

The girl said, “…okay.”

They went back to their conversation but it was quieter after that. They were chewing on it.

That’s all I wanted.

I leaned back and looked at my nails. Pink was right. Sometimes you don’t need to be loud.

Yvette finished Aisha’s feet and brought me some water without me asking. Set it on the little table next to me. Patted my shoulder once on her way back to the station.

That’s my girl.