Terrence, the big quiet aide in scrubs, pulled a folded police report out of his jacket and set it on the table next to Grandmas birthday cake.
Miss Diane, he said, you said somebody has to do the cuticles. Let me tell you what your niece did with a bottle of nail polish.
Every Tuesday, Terrence said, Amy closes her salon early and comes to the nursing home across the street to paint the old ladies nails for free. In December, while she was doing one womans manicure, that woman told her, quiet as anything, that a caregiver had been stealing her money and threatening her. Nobody had believed the old lady before. Amy believed her. Amy wrote it down and took it to the police, and this report is the result. That caregiver was stealing from six residents. Six. She is not stealing from anybody now, because of your niece and a bottle of pink polish.
The party had gone silent.
Diane called it filing toenails, and a manicurist listened to an old woman nobody else would believe and stopped a thief who was preying on six helpless people.
Terrence said one of those six residents was his own grandmother, and that was why he had driven Grandma to the party, and why he had been waiting all night with the report in his pocket.
I am Amys mother. She blew on Grandmas pink nails and said happy birthday, Grandma, and let her Aunt Diane talk, because a woman who gives up every Tuesday so that no one has to be eighty-nine with chipped polish does not need a broker on a billboard to tell her she matters. Diane set down her mimosa and did not pick it back up.