Enid leans over the sink while her husband, Floyd, dyes her sparse hair. His veined, shaky hands are covered in the clear plastic gloves that came in the Clairol “Flame Red” coloring kit. The gloves are too small and stop below his wrists. It’s awkward, but everything for him is awkward or impossible. Using an old pair of children’s scissors, he struggles to snip the top off the squeeze bottle. His hands feel like dumb paws.
Enid’s back is stiff with age, but she manages to bend forward enough to allow her husband of sixty years to gently transfer water from the spout onto her scalp with a cupped hand. Back and forth, and back and forth, maybe twenty times. There is no hurry.
A beige towel hangs from her frail shoulders like a stole. Enid’s a small woman who in her old age is impossibly small—ninety pounds at most. Her skin is freckled and pale, a redhead’s skin, but her hair has gone white now. Floyd dyes it for his sake. Enid has been blind for years.
Enid and Floyd live in the detached garage behind their house. Floyd converted it into a suite. The living room has two torn reclining chairs, a black-and-white television, and a bookcase. Fake wood paneling lines two walls, one wall is the garage door, and a half wall separates the living room from the kitchen. The kitchen has a mini fridge, a two-burner hot plate, and a toaster oven, all purchased at garage sales. When they eat, and Floyd does all the cooking, they sit in the living room and use rusty TV trays, also from a garage sale. Their bedroom is only slightly larger than the double bed. The bathroom is off this little room and has no door. A sliding curtain provides privacy, should anyone visit them and need to use their bathroom, though this has never happened.
“Too cold?” Floyd asks.
“A little.”
Floyd squeezes dye onto his wife’s hair, massaging it from root to end, following the instructions on the box. “Now we have to wait five minutes,” he tells her.
Floyd covers her hair with a Motel 6 shower cap. He bought twenty-five of them at a garage sale for five cents. Each comes in a nice little box. He sits Enid on a kitchen chair and pours them cups of Nescafé, then adds evaporated milk. Enid rests quietly on the edge of her chair. She’s wearing black slacks with an elastic waist, bright white running shoes, and a Gap tee shirt.
It’s hot outside, summer, so the kitchen door is open. If Floyd were stronger, he would raise the garage door and let in a nice cross breeze. Outside their kitchen is a cement patio, a trellis covered with clematis vines, and a very blue sky. Floyd sets an egg timer and they wait.
When the timer buzzes, Floyd rinses then blots Enid’s hair with a frayed towel. He pulls a plastic comb from the breast pocket of his polyester short-sleeved shirt. The comb has three broken teeth. It might be twenty years old, or forty.
As he combs a side part into his wife’s hair, Floyd remembers how he used to cut his son’s hair. Jimmy died twenty years ago from brittle diabetes. It’s a long, sad story and, occasionally, when he can’t stop himself, it plays in Floyd’s mind. The disease kept Jimmy from having the things you’d expect a life to contain: work, marriage, children, old age.
Floyd trims Enid’s hair, too, but not today. Now they are tired and Floyd leads Enid out onto the patio and they finish their coffee. Floyd looks up at the clematis vines. Enid looks in the direction of her husband.
“Last night I dreamt the moon fell out of the sky,” she tells him.
“Then what happened?” he asks.
“It landed on the sidewalk, and when I picked it up it was cold and smelled like rain and wind.”
Floyd laughs. “Then what?”
“I had to put it back up into the sky. I got a ladder and pinned it.”
They both laugh.
Enid and Floyd rent their house, the three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow they bought when they first moved to Madison and Floyd was promoted, to a woman who promised to cook them Sunday dinner and help with shopping and doctor visits in exchange for reduced rent. She hardly does a thing. She forgets or promises to do everything later, but when Floyd complains, she cries and apologizes and tells him her problems.
“I get these terrible migraines,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. But she cooks them Sunday dinner, most Sundays, unless something comes up.
Tonight is Sunday and the woman will serve them hot dogs, potato chips, and Seven Up. After dinner, while they are eating orange sherbet, a process server will knock at the door. Floyd’s hearing is so bad that he will not hear the woman promise to give Floyd the bench warrant for the unpaid tickets she’s accrued on Floyd’s car.
“Who was that?” Floyd asks when the woman returns to the dining room.
“Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she says and sighs.
“You should have invited them in for sherbet,” Floyd says.
“Yes, they’d like that. I bet they could use something refreshing,” Enid says.
“Next time,” the woman says.
Eventually, Floyd will find out about the tickets, the dented fender, the rent checks that bounced, but not tonight.
Floyd pushes back his chair. “Guess it’s time to hit the hay.” He carries their dinner plates into the kitchen, leaves them clattering on the counter, then returns to help Enid.
“Let’s stay outside for a bit,” she says.
Floyd and Enid sit on the patio under the trellis, their hands entwined. The night air is warm and still.
“The moon is full,” Floyd tells her. “I can see the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt.”
“What else?” Enid asks. “Tell me everything you see.”
Jeanne Shoemaker is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her writing has appeared in The Iowa Review, Full Grown People , and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. In 2013, she won the Pushcart Prize for her story, “Sonny Criss.” Most recently she has been writing flash fiction and working on a novel. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.