A 300-Pound Biker Sat Down In A Nail Salon And Asked For Purple Nails With Little White Stars — The Nail Tech Saw His Fingertips And Started Crying
Part 2
I need to tell you about Lulu.
I didn’t know any of this when Tiny sat down in my chair. I learned it that afternoon, and over many Saturdays after.
Louisa Grace Hebert. Seven years old. First grade at Scenic Heights Elementary. Gap-toothed. Loud. Obsessed with three things: the color purple, the stars on the ceiling of her bedroom, and her Uncle Tiny.
Her mother is Amber. Tiny’s little sister. Her father is Josh, who works offshore on the rigs, two weeks on, two weeks off.
Tiny is her godfather.
He’s also, Amber told me, the reason he’s still alive.
Duane LeBlanc got the name Tiny in the Navy, the way big men always do. He joined the Seabees out of high school. Construction battalion. He built airstrips and bridges and runways in places he doesn’t name. He went to Iraq in 2005.
When he came home, he couldn’t stop shaking. Couldn’t sleep without the TV on. Couldn’t walk into a crowded room without finding the exits first.
He drank for nine years. Lost a marriage. Lost a job at the port. Lived in his truck for most of 2014.
Amber took him in. Put him on her couch. Told him he could stay as long as he didn’t drink in her house.
In 2018, Lulu was born.
Amber put her in his arms at the hospital. Two days old. Six pounds, one ounce.
He looked at her for a long time. Then he handed her back, walked out to the parking lot, poured a half-full bottle of whiskey out on the asphalt, and called the VA.
He’s been sober since that day. Seven years.
He drives a crane at the Port of Pensacola now. Rides with the Emerald Coast Riders on Sundays, out US-98 along the water to Navarre and back.
And every Saturday he has off, he spends with Lulu.
For years, she’d been asking for a Nail Day.
She’d sit on his lap with her little bottles of polish from the Dollar Tree and beg to paint his nails.
“Someday,” he always said. “Someday, Lu.”
She drew it. Over and over. Two hands. Hers and his. Purple. With stars, because the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling were her favorite thing in the world.
He kept every drawing.
Three weeks before he walked into my salon, Lulu got sick.
At first it seemed like nothing. She was thirsty all the time. She was peeing all the time, wetting the bed for the first time since she was three. She lost weight. She was tired.
Then one morning she wouldn’t wake up properly. Her breath smelled strange. Sweet. Like nail polish remover.
Amber drove her to the children’s hospital on Ninth Avenue at eighty miles an hour.
Diabetic ketoacidosis. Type 1 diabetes. Her pancreas had stopped making insulin.
She spent four days in the pediatric ICU.
When she woke up all the way, a nurse explained to her what her life was going to be now.
Finger pricks. Eight, ten times a day. To check the sugar in her blood.
Insulin shots. Four, five times a day.
Every day. Forever.
Lulu took it bravely the first day.
On the second day, she cried.
On the third day, she screamed.
By the second week, she fought every single finger prick like a wild animal. Kicking. Biting. Pulling her hands under the blanket. Her fingertips were raw. Her mother was exhausted. The nurses were tired.
And one night, between sobs, she said the thing that sent her uncle to my nail salon.
Part 3
I followed Tiny’s Harley down Ninth Avenue in my Camry. He drove it like it was on fire. I lost him twice.
I found him in the hallway on the fourth floor, outside Room 411, half his nails still wet, purple polish smeared on his vest from the ride.
I could hear her before I saw her.
Screaming. That high, raw, desperate sound children make when they’re beyond tired.
“NO! NO! IT HURTS! NOBODY ELSE HAS TO DO IT!”
Tiny went through the door. I stood in the doorway with my kit.
Lulu was on the bed, pressed into the corner against the rail. Small. Pale. Hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. Both hands balled into fists under her armpits. A nurse stood by the bed holding a lancet and a meter. Amber was on the other side, crying, trying to pry one of her daughter’s hands loose.
“She’s dropping,” the nurse said quietly to Tiny. “Sixty-one ten minutes ago. I need a number right now. If she’s going lower, we need to treat her.”
“I hate it!” Lulu screamed. “I hate it! Why is it only me? Why does it only hurt ME?”
Tiny didn’t say anything.
He walked around the bed. He sat down on the very edge of it. The mattress sank.
He held out his left hand. Palm up.
Half the nails purple. Half bare. And every fingertip full of those little dark dots.
Lulu stopped screaming.
She stared at his hand.
He took the black pouch off his belt. Took out his own lancet. Held it against his left thumb, the worst one, already bruised almost black.
His hand was shaking. Hard. His face had gone gray. A bead of sweat ran down from under his do-rag into his beard. I watched him swallow twice.
He looked at her.
“Me first,” he said.
Click.
A drop of red came up on his thumb.
He didn’t look at it. He was looking at her.
“Now you, Lu.”
She looked at his thumb for a long time.
Then, very slowly, she pulled her right hand out from under her arm, and held it out toward the nurse.
But she didn’t look at the nurse.
She looked at his purple nails.
Click.
She didn’t scream.
Her lip shook. Tears ran down her face. But she didn’t make a sound.
The meter beeped. Fifty-eight. Low. The nurse gave her apple juice and glucose tabs. Lulu drank it with one hand. With the other hand, she held onto two of Tiny’s fingers. The purple ones.
Fifteen minutes later, she was ninety-four. Safe.
Amber sat down on the floor of that hospital room and put her face in her hands.
I thought that was it. That was the story. An uncle being brave for a scared little girl.
I stepped into the room with my kit to do his stars.
Then the nurse said something, very quietly, to Amber, that made me put my kit down.
“Does she know he’s been doing this every time? For nineteen days?”
Part 4
Every time.
Not just today. Not just when he visited.
Every single time Lulu got a finger prick, since the second week, Tiny pricked his own finger too.
Amber explained it to me later, in the hallway, while Lulu slept.
On the night Lulu said it only hurts me, she’d said one more thing. Through her tears. To no one in particular.
“Nobody knows what it feels like.”
Tiny had been sitting in the corner of the room. He didn’t say anything. He went home at midnight.
The next morning, he walked into the CVS on Davis Highway and bought a glucose meter, a lancing device, and two hundred lancets.
He told Amber to text him every time.
Every reading. Every prick. Day or night.
When Amber texted 186, he was at the port, sitting in his crane cab a hundred feet in the air. He took out the lancet and did his own finger.
When she texted 92 at three in the morning, he was asleep on his couch with the phone on his chest. He woke up and did his own finger.
At work. At red lights. At the gas station. In the shower once, Amber said, when she texted at the wrong time.
Eight, nine, ten times a day.
Nineteen days.
Somewhere around a hundred and seventy finger pricks.
That’s what those dots were. The ones I’d thought were something dirty. The ones that made me want to call my husband.
They were love.
Just the ugliest-looking love I’ve ever seen.
And then Amber told me the part that made me sit down on the hallway floor next to her.
“You know he’s terrified of needles, right?”
I looked at her.
“He passes out,” she said. “Since he was a little boy. When he enlisted in the Navy, he fainted during his shots and hit his head on a chair. They called him Sleeping Beauty for two years.”
“But the tattoos—”
“Every tattoo he has, he got drunk,” she said. “Sal down on Palafox kept a bucket by the chair for him. He hasn’t gotten a new one since he got sober. He can’t.”
I thought about him turning his head away from my cuticle pusher. Sweating in my chair. Through his teeth: Don’t like sharp things.
A hundred and seventy times.
Every single one, a man who faints at needles, holding one to his own finger, alone, and pressing the button.
So a seven-year-old girl would know somebody else felt it too.
Part 5
When Lulu woke up, I did his stars.
I sat on the side of her hospital bed with my kit open on the tray table. Tiny sat on the other side. Lulu lay between us with the drawing in her lap so I could copy it right.
First I finished his other five nails. Purple. Two coats. Then a top coat.
Then the stars. White polish, a dotting tool, five little points each. Ten nails. Ten stars.
Lulu watched every single one. She corrected me twice. My stars were too small. She was right.
When I finished, Tiny held his hands up next to the drawing.
Exactly like it. Purple. Stars.
And Lulu, seven years old, with an IV in her arm and fingertips raw from three weeks of needles, laughed out loud for the first time since the ICU.
“Uncle Tiny! You’re SO PRETTY!”
He held his hands up in the air and turned them back and forth like a movie star.
“I know it,” he said.
Then I did hers.
Same purple. Same stars. Very gently. Her fingertips were so sore, I didn’t touch the ends at all.
When I finished, she held her little hands up next to his huge ones. Ten purple stars. Ten more purple stars.
Exactly like the drawing.
“Nail Day,” she whispered.
Tiny didn’t say anything. His jaw was clenched under that beard. His eyes were wet and red, and nothing came down. He just nodded.
I packed up my kit. I wouldn’t let him pay. He tried to put a hundred-dollar bill in my apron pocket and I put it right back in his vest.
At the door, I asked him one question. I had to.
“Why purple?”
He looked at his hands.
“She drew ’em purple,” he said. “Every time she gets stuck, she looks at my hand. She sees the purple, she knows it’s me. She knows I got stuck too.”
He turned his hands over, palms up. Purple stars on top. Bruised fingertips underneath.
“Uncle feels it too,” he said. “That’s all she needs to know.”
Part 6
Lulu went home five days later.
She doesn’t need ten finger pricks a day anymore. In July, she got a sensor. A little round thing on the back of her arm that checks her sugar on its own. Now she only pricks her fingers a few times a week, when the sensor needs checking.
Tiny still keeps the lancet in his vest pocket.
Every time Lulu has to do a finger check, she texts him. She does it herself now, on Amber’s phone. One word.
STAR.
And wherever he is — the crane, the clubhouse, the side of US-98 — he pulls over, takes out the lancet, and does his.
Then he takes a picture of his purple thumb with the little drop of red on it and sends it back.
Every other Saturday, they come to Lotus Nails.
Ten o’clock. The burnt-orange Harley pulls up out front with a little purple helmet strapped to the back seat. The polish bottles rattle on my wall. My regulars know the sound now. Mrs. Peterson under the dryer says, “Here comes the Nail Day crew.”
They sit side by side at my station. Big chair, little chair.
Same purple. Same white stars. Every time.
Lulu picks the order. She always makes me do Uncle Tiny first.
“He’s braver if he goes first,” she tells me.
He says nothing. He just sits there with his hands on my table, fingertips mostly healed now. A few old dots still left, faded white like tiny scars.
Some of the Emerald Coast Riders started coming too. They say it’s for their wives. It isn’t. Last month, a man named Grizzly, who must be sixty-five, sat at my station and asked for “whatever the kid’s got.”
The drawing is on my mirror now. Taped in the corner. ME AND UNCLE TINY NAIL DAY.
Customers ask about it all the time.
I tell them it’s the best nail art I’ve ever done.
Part 7
Last Saturday, Lulu brought me a new drawing.
Same two hands. Purple nails. White stars.
But this time, there was a third hand. A medium one. With purple nails and stars too.
At the top it said: ME AND UNCLE TINY AND MISS LAN NAIL DAY.
I didn’t know what to say. I cried right there at my station, in front of Mrs. Peterson and two Navy wives and a lady getting a pedicure.
Tiny handed me a napkin. With his purple-star fingers.
Then Lulu reached into the pocket of her little purple jacket and took out something. She held it out to me.
A lancet. Brand new. Still in the wrapper.
“Uncle Tiny says I can pick one person,” she said. “For when I get scared and he’s at work.”
I looked at Tiny.
He shrugged those huge shoulders.
“She picked you,” he said.
So now there are two of us.
When the text comes in the middle of my workday — STAR — I go into the back room, away from the customers.
I hold my own finger out. I close my eyes.
And I do it.
It hurts. It always hurts. Every single time.
I don’t know how he did it a hundred and seventy times.
I think about him in that crane, a hundred feet in the air, a man afraid of needles, pressing the button so a little girl wouldn’t be alone.
Then I take a picture of my purple fingernail with the white star and the little drop of red.
And I send it.
Me too.
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