The morning light came gray through the windows of the Golden Lotus Nail Salon, and Linh Nguyen sat in the third chair from the left, the one with the small tear in the vinyl that she'd covered with clear tape. She sat there every morning now, in the customer's chair instead of the technician's stool, because there were no customers anymore, hadn't been but three all week, and it was Thursday.
Outside, Broken Bow, Nebraska, was waking up the way it always did, slow and methodical, pickup trucks rumbling down Central Avenue toward the feed store, toward the John Deere dealership, toward the jobs that still existed. Linh watched them pass and counted: seven trucks, two cars, one school bus running late. In Saigon, she would have counted hundreds of motorbikes by now, thousands of people. But that was forty-five years ago, and she was seven then, and now she was fifty-two and sitting in an empty nail salon in the middle of America, watching her dream die as quietly as everything else in this town.
The bell above the door rang, brass and bright, a sound so unexpected that Linh started, knocking over the bottle of cuticle oil she'd been holding. She looked up to see a woman standing in the doorway, broad-shouldered and thick-handed, wearing a faded denim jacket over a flannel shirt. The woman was maybe sixty-five, maybe seventy, with gray hair pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail and the kind of face that had seen too much sun and too much wind and too much sorrow.
"You open?" the woman asked, and her voice had gravel in it.
"Yes," Linh said, standing quickly, smoothing her smock. "Yes, we are open. You want manicure? Pedicure? I have special today, both for thirty-five dollar."
The woman looked around the empty salon, at the ten stations with their neat rows of polish, at the pedicure chairs that Linh had bought used from a salon in Grand Island that had gone under, at the wall decorated with pictures of elaborate nail art that nobody in Broken Bow had ever asked for.
"No," the woman said. "I don't want none of that. I just..." She stopped, seemed to wrestle with something inside herself. "You got coffee?"
Linh blinked. "Coffee?"
"Yeah. Coffee. The stuff you drink."
"I have tea," Linh said carefully. "Jasmine tea."
The woman considered this. "That'll do."
And that was how Martha Kowalski came into Linh's life, sideways and unexpected, like rain in August.
They sat in the back room, which wasn't really a room so much as a corner Linh had sectioned off with a curtain, where she kept a hot plate and a small refrigerator and a table she'd bought at a garage sale. The tea was good, imported from a Vietnamese grocery in Omaha, and Martha held the cup with both hands like she was holding a small bird.
"My husband died," Martha said without preamble. "Three months ago. Combine accident."
Linh knew about saying the worst thing first, getting it out like pulling a tooth. "I am sorry," she said.
"Forty-three years we were married. Forty-three years on that farm. Now it's just me and six hundred acres of corn that I don't know what to do with."
"You have children?"
"One son. Lives in Denver. Sells insurance." Martha said this like it was a betrayal, which maybe it was. "He wants me to sell the farm, move to one of those places. Senior living." She spat the words out.
Linh poured more tea. Outside, she could hear Dale Hutchinson's voice from his hardware store next door, explaining to someone why the price of feed was going up, why everything was going up, why America wasn't what it used to be. She'd heard this speech before, knew where it led.
"This town," Martha said, looking around the empty salon, "it's dying, isn't it?"
"Yes," Linh said, because there was no point in lying.
"But you're still here."
"Where else would I go?"
Martha looked at her then, really looked at her, and Linh saw something she recognized: the particular loneliness of being left behind.
"My children live in California," Linh said. "They have good jobs. They send money. They want me to come live with them, but..." She stopped, searched for the words in English that could explain the weight of leaving again, of being the mother who needed taking care of, of giving up the last thing that was truly hers.
"But this is home," Martha finished.
"Yes."
They sat in silence for a while, drinking jasmine tea in the back room of a failing nail salon, two women who had nothing in common except everything that mattered.
"You know," Martha said finally, "I never had a manicure. Not once in my whole life. Stan would've laughed his head off, me getting my nails done."
"Stan was your husband?"
"Yeah. Big Polish son of a bitch. Hands like ham hocks. Heart like a sparrow." Martha's eyes went soft, then hard again. "So what's it cost? A manicure?"
"For you, first time special. Fifteen dollar."
"Highway robbery," Martha said, but she was almost smiling. "Let's do it."
Linh led her to the first chair, the good one, and Martha sat down like she was sitting in church, uncomfortable but determined. Her hands, when Linh took them, were maps of work: scars from barbed wire, calluses from tools, nails broken down to the quick, cuticles like leather. They were hands that had birthed calves, driven tractors, kneaded bread, held a dying husband. They were beautiful.
"This might take some time," Linh said.
"I got nothing but time," Martha said.
As Linh worked, filing and soaking and softening, Martha talked. She talked about Stan, about the farm, about the son who called once a month and visited once a year. She talked about the town she'd lived in all her life, how it had changed, how the young people left and never came back, how the stores closed one by one like lights going out.
"Dale Hutchinson says it's because of the immigrants," Martha said, and Linh's hands stilled for a moment. "Says they're taking all the jobs, changing everything."
"And what do you think?" Linh asked, her voice neutral as water.
Martha was quiet for a long moment. "I think Dale Hutchinson is a small man with big fears. I think this town was dying long before you got here. And I think..." She paused, watched Linh's careful hands working on her own rough ones. "I think I been lonely for a long time, and I didn't even know it until right now."
When Martha left, her nails painted a pale pink that she chose because it "won't show the dirt so much," she promised to come back next week. Linh didn't believe her. People promised a lot of things.
But Martha did come back, the next Thursday at the same time, and the Thursday after that. She brought coffee from the gas station, strong and bitter, and they mixed it with Linh's jasmine tea until they found a combination that worked. Martha talked about the farm, and Linh found herself talking about things she hadn't talked about in years: the fishing village where her mother was born, the chaos of leaving Saigon, the refugee camp in the Philippines, the aunt in Nebraska who sponsored them, who ran a restaurant in Omaha until she died and left Linh enough money to start something of her own.
"Why here?" Martha asked one day. "Why Broken Bow?"
"It was far enough from Omaha that I could afford it," Linh said. "And it reminded me..." She stopped, embarrassed.
"What?"
"The fields. They reminded me of rice paddies. I know it's not the same, corn is not rice, but the way they move in the wind..." She shrugged.
Martha nodded like this made perfect sense.
On the fifth Thursday, Martha brought something besides coffee. She brought a paper bag full of tomatoes, real tomatoes, not the pale things from the grocery store but deep red fruit that smelled like summer.
"From my garden," she said. "Too many for one person."
Linh bit into one like it was an apple, and the taste exploded in her mouth, brought tears to her eyes. "Oh," she said. "Oh, this is..."
"Yeah," Martha said. "Stan always did have a way with tomatoes."
"I had a garden," Linh said. "In the backyard. But the rabbits, they eat everything."
"You need fence," Martha said. "And marigolds. Rabbits hate marigolds. I'll bring you some."
"You don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to. When has that ever stopped anyone from doing anything?"
The next week, Martha showed up with a truck full of fencing supplies and a flat of marigolds. She wore work gloves and a determined expression. "Come on," she said. "This is a two-person job."
They spent the day building a fence around a small patch of Linh's backyard, Martha showing Linh how to stretch the wire tight, how to set the posts deep enough that they wouldn't frost-heave in winter. They planted the marigolds in a bright orange border.
"What will you grow?" Martha asked.
"I don't know. What grows here?"
"Hell, just about anything if you're stubborn enough. But it's late in the season now. You'll have to wait until spring for most things." Martha thought for a moment. "Although you could do winter vegetables. Kale, Brussels sprouts. Things that like the cold."
"Vietnamese vegetables?" Linh asked, and there was hope in her voice that she tried to hide.
"I don't know nothing about Vietnamese vegetables," Martha said. "But I know about soil and sun and water. We could figure it out."
That night, Linh went online and ordered seeds from a specialty company: water spinach, bitter melon, lemongrass, Thai basil. Seeds for plants that might not grow in Nebraska soil, but then again, she hadn't thought she would grow here either, and yet here she was, fifty-two years old with earth under her fingernails and a friend named Martha.
The trouble started, as trouble often does in small towns, at a town council meeting. Dale Hutchinson had been elected to the council the previous year on a platform of "bringing back traditional values" and "putting Broken Bow first." He was a small, neat man who wore his fear like cologne, and he had ideas about how to save the town that mostly involved keeping it exactly as it had never really been.
Martha had dragged Linh to the meeting. "You need to know what they're saying," she'd said. "You need to hear it for yourself."
The meeting was in the basement of the Lutheran church, fluorescent lights humming over folding chairs and a card table where the five council members sat. Dale was in the middle, naturally, his hardware store apron replaced by a tie that didn't quite match his shirt.
"We need to talk about the impact of non-traditional businesses on our downtown," Dale was saying when they walked in. Several heads turned to look at Linh, then quickly away. "Businesses that don't contribute to the traditional character of our community."
"What the hell is a non-traditional business?" Martha asked loudly from the back, and more heads turned.
Dale's face flushed. "Martha, this is a civilized discussion—"
"I asked a question, Dale. What makes a business non-traditional? The Golden Lotus has been here fifteen years. That's longer than your hardware store."
"It's not about length of time," Dale said carefully. "It's about whether a business serves the real needs of our community."
"And nail salons don't serve a real need?" Martha held up her hands, the pale pink polish gleaming under the fluorescent lights. "Seems pretty real to me."
A murmur went through the room. Betty Morrison, who ran the quilting shop, said, "Martha, I think what Dale means is—"
"I know what Dale means," Martha said. "He means businesses run by people who don't look like him."
The room went silent except for the hum of the lights.
Dale stood up, his face now fully red. "That is not what I mean, and you know it. I'm talking about economic viability. These businesses—" He caught himself before saying something he couldn't take back. "Certain businesses are struggling, and empty storefronts hurt property values for everyone."
"Then why don't you worry about the three empty buildings on Main Street that have been vacant for five years?" Martha shot back. "Why start with the one business that's still hanging on?"
"Because," Dale said, and now his voice had an edge to it, "we have to be strategic about what kind of businesses we encourage. We need businesses that attract the right kind of customers, that bring in the right kind of growth."
"The right kind," Martha repeated. "Jesus Christ, Dale, just say what you mean."
But Dale was too smart for that, had been to too many seminars about leadership and communication. He sat back down, shuffled his papers. "I'm proposing an ordinance that would require all business signage to be in English only, and that would establish aesthetic guidelines for storefronts to maintain the historic character of our downtown."
Linh felt something cold settle in her stomach. Her sign said "Golden Lotus Nail Salon" in English, but underneath, smaller, it said the same in Vietnamese. She'd painted it herself when she first opened, a small reminder of who she was.
"That's discrimination," Martha said.
"It's preservation," Dale countered. "We have to preserve what makes Broken Bow special."
"What makes Broken Bow special," Martha said, her voice carrying now, "is that we're supposed to be good people. Neighborly people. The kind of people who help each other out when times are tough. When did that change, Dale? When did you become so scared of everything?"
Dale's jaw tightened. "I'm not scared. I'm practical. And if certain people can't adapt to our way of life—"
"Certain people," Martha said. "There it is."
She stood up, and Linh stood with her, though her legs felt like water. They walked out together, Martha's hand on Linh's elbow, firm and warm. Behind them, the meeting continued, voices rising and falling like wheat in the wind.
In the parking lot, Martha was shaking. "Forty years I've known Dale Hutchinson. Forty years, and I never thought..." She stopped, took a breath. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry you had to hear that."
"It's not the first time," Linh said quietly. "It won't be the last."
"Well, it should be. It should be the last goddamn time anyone has to hear that kind of..." Martha stopped again, and Linh saw that she was crying, this tough woman who'd buried a husband and run a farm and never once complained about anything.
"Come," Linh said. "We get tea."
They drove to the salon in silence, and Linh made tea in the back room while Martha sat at the garage sale table and tried to stop crying.
"I was at Stan's funeral," Martha said finally, "and Dale Hutchinson stood at the grave and talked about what a good man Stan was, what a good American. Like that word belonged to him, like he got to decide who was American enough." She looked up at Linh. "Stan's parents came from Poland. Did you know that? They came with nothing, just like..."
"Just like me," Linh finished.
"Yeah. And nobody told them they couldn't put up a sign in Polish. Nobody told them they weren't the right kind."
"Maybe they did," Linh said gently. "Maybe Stan never told you."
Martha considered this. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe they did."
They sat quietly for a while, drinking tea that had gone cold. Outside, Broken Bow was settling into evening, porch lights coming on, families gathering for dinner, the ordinary life of a small town continuing as if nothing had happened, as if something fundamental hadn't shifted in the basement of the Lutheran church.
"I've been thinking," Martha said suddenly. "About your garden. About Vietnamese vegetables. What if... what if we did more than just a garden?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, I've got six hundred acres and nobody to farm it. The corn barely breaks even most years. But vegetables, specialty vegetables, the kind of things people can't get at the grocery store..." She leaned forward, and there was light in her eyes now. "There's Vietnamese communities in Omaha, Lincoln. Restaurants, markets. They need suppliers."
"You want to grow Vietnamese vegetables? You?"
"Not just me. Us. Together. A partnership." Martha's hands were moving now, sketching shapes in the air. "We could start small, maybe five acres. See what grows, what doesn't. I've got the land and the equipment. You've got the knowledge of what people actually want to buy."
"I don't know how to farm," Linh said.
"And I don't know how to grow bitter melon. So we learn."
Linh looked at this woman, this unexpected friend, and felt something she hadn't felt in a long time: possibility. "It would be very hard."
"Everything's hard," Martha said. "But hard with a friend is better than easy alone."
That night, Linh called her daughter in California. "I'm going to become a farmer," she said.
There was a long pause. "Mom, are you okay?"
"Yes," Linh said, and realized she meant it. "I'm very okay."
The next morning, she arrived at the salon to find the front window broken, glass scattered across the floor like diamonds. Someone had spray-painted words on the wall, ugly words that didn't deserve repeating. Her sign, the one she'd painted herself, was splattered with red paint that looked like blood.
She stood there for a long moment, looking at the destruction, feeling all the fear and anger and exhaustion of fifteen years in this town rise up in her throat. Then she heard a truck pull up behind her, and Martha was there, along with Betty Morrison from the quilting shop, and Tom Rodriguez from the bank, and old Jim Patterson who ran the coffee shop.
"We heard what happened," Betty said, and she was carrying a broom.
"This isn't right," Tom said. "This isn't who we are."
They worked together through the morning, sweeping glass, scrubbing walls, covering the broken window with plywood until new glass could be ordered. More people came as word spread: the young couple who ran the organic grocery, the librarian, the high school principal. Even some of Dale's supporters showed up, quiet and ashamed, holding cleaning supplies like peace offerings.
Dale himself came by around noon, stood on the sidewalk looking at the damage. "This isn't what I wanted," he said. "You have to know that. I never wanted anything like this."
"But you opened the door," Martha said. "You made it okay to be afraid, to be angry at the wrong people. This is what happens when you open that door."
Dale looked like he wanted to argue, but then he saw Linh's face, saw the exhaustion there, and something in him seemed to break. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'll pay for the window. The sign too."
"I don't want your money," Linh said, and her voice was steady as stone. "I want you to remember this. Every time you think about who belongs here and who doesn't, I want you to remember this broken glass."
Dale nodded and walked away, shoulders hunched like he was carrying something heavy.
By evening, the salon was clean, though the plywood over the window made everything dim. Linh sat in the third chair from the left, the one with the tape over the tear, and looked at her empty salon that wasn't quite as empty anymore. Martha sat beside her, and Betty, and Tom, and the others who had stayed.
"We could paint it," Betty said. "The plywood. Make it beautiful until the new window comes."
"Paint what?" Linh asked.
"Whatever you want. Flowers maybe. Or..." Betty paused, thinking. "What about vegetables? All the things you're going to grow?"
And so they did. Over the next few days, people brought paint and brushes, and they covered the plywood with a garden: tomatoes and bitter melon, lemongrass and corn, marigolds and water spinach, all growing together in impossible harmony. Children from the elementary school came and added butterflies and bees. Someone painted a small sign in the corner: "Broken Bow: Growing Together."
The Des Moines Register picked up the story, ran a photo of Linh and Martha standing in front of the painted window, and suddenly the salon was busy again. People drove from other towns to get their nails done, to buy the Vietnamese vegetables that Linh had started selling from a small display by the register, to be part of something that felt like hope.
Spring came early that year, or maybe it just seemed that way because Linh and Martha were ready for it. They started the seeds in Martha's greenhouse, hundreds of small pots lined up on tables Stan had built years ago. Linh taught Martha the Vietnamese names for the vegetables, and Martha taught Linh about soil pH and frost dates and the peculiar temperament of Nebraska weather.
"This one," Linh said, holding up a bitter melon seedling, "needs very warm soil. In Vietnam, it grows all year."
"We'll use black plastic mulch," Martha said. "Heats up the soil. And row covers if we get a late frost."
They worked side by side through the spring, preparing the five acres Martha had set aside, building trellises for the climbing vegetables, laying irrigation lines. Martha's son came from Denver, skeptical at first, but when he saw his mother in the field, more alive than she'd been since Stan died, he stopped arguing and started helping.
The first harvest was small, some things failing entirely, others producing beyond their wildest hopes. The water spinach grew like it had been waiting all its life for Nebraska soil. The bitter melons were small but perfect. The lemongrass survived a hailstorm that flattened half the corn in the county.
They sold everything they grew, delivering to Vietnamese restaurants in Omaha, to Asian markets in Lincoln, to families who drove out to the farm just to walk through the fields and see familiar plants growing in unfamiliar soil. Linh kept the salon open three days a week, and the other days she was in the fields with Martha, learning the rhythm of American farming, teaching the rhythm of Vietnamese cooking.
"We should do a cookbook," Martha said one day, dirt under her fingernails that no amount of manicuring could remove. "Vietnamese recipes with Nebraska ingredients. Call it 'The Soil Between Us' or something like that."
"That's a terrible title," Linh said, but she was smiling.
"Well, you come up with something better then."
They were sitting on Martha's porch, watching the sun set over the fields where corn grew alongside bitter melon, where lemongrass bordered the tomatoes, where two different worlds had found a way to share the same soil.
"I was thinking," Linh said, "about next year. We could do classes. Cooking classes, gardening classes. Teach people how to grow their own Vietnamese vegetables, how to cook them."
"At the salon?"
"No, here. On the farm. We could fix up the old barn, put in a kitchen." Linh's eyes were bright with plans. "My daughter, she says she might move back, help with the business side. And your son—"
"He'll never move back," Martha said, but there was less certainty in her voice than before.
"Never is a long time," Linh said.
Dale Hutchinson lost the next election to Tom Rodriguez, who ran on a platform of "diversity and economic development." The hardware store struggled for a while, then Dale sold it to a young couple from Mexico who turned it into a combination hardware store and taqueria. Dale worked there part-time, learning Spanish from the owners, selling his famous tomatoes from a stand out front.
Betty Morrison started stocking Vietnamese fabrics in her quilting shop, beautiful silks and cottons that Linh helped her source. The patterns that emerged were something new, neither purely American nor purely Vietnamese, but something in between, something that could only have been created in Broken Bow, Nebraska, in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
On a Thursday in late summer, almost exactly two years after Martha first walked into the Golden Lotus Nail Salon, they sat in the back room drinking their strange mixture of coffee and jasmine tea. The salon was full, three Vietnamese teenagers from Omaha learning to do nail art, their mothers gossiping in a mixture of English and Vietnamese while Betty Morrison showed them quilting techniques.
"Did you ever think," Martha said, "when you first came here, that it would be like this?"
"No," Linh said. "I thought I would be alone forever."
"Me too," Martha said. "After Stan died. Me too."
Outside the window, they could see the garden, not the small patch they'd started with but a full quarter-acre now, with a greenhouse for starting seeds and cold frames for winter vegetables. A group of elementary school children were there on a field trip, learning about plants that grew on the other side of the world but also right here, in their town, in soil that didn't care where seeds came from, only that they were planted with knowledge and tended with care.
"Your son called," Linh said. "He wants to know about the business plan for the cooking school."
"He's not moving back," Martha said automatically.
"He's already looked at houses."
Martha turned to stare at her. "What?"
"He told me. Last week when he was here. He's been looking online." Linh smiled. "He likes that blue one on Maple Street, the one with the big kitchen."
"That sneaky little..." Martha shook her head, but she was smiling too. "Just like his father, never saying what he's thinking until he's already done it."
"My daughter too. She already gave notice at her job."
They sat with this knowledge, these two women who had found each other in the ruins of their different losses, who had built something new from the broken pieces of their lives.
"We need a name," Martha said. "For all of it. The farm, the classes, everything. A name that means something."
Linh thought for a moment. "In Vietnamese, we have a saying: 'Đất lành chim đậu.' It means 'Birds land on good soil.' When the soil is good, everything grows. Birds come. Life comes."
"Good Soil Farm," Martha said, testing it out. "Simple. True."
"Good Soil," Linh agreed.
The sun was setting by the time the last customer left, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold that made the corn fields look like they were on fire. Martha and Linh stood in the doorway of the salon, looking out at their town, their home, this place that had broken their hearts and healed them too.
"Same time next week?" Martha asked, though it wasn't really a question anymore.
"Every week," Linh said.
Martha drove away in her truck, and Linh locked up the salon, checking twice that everything was secure. The new window gleamed in the dying light, and through it she could see the painted mural they'd decided to keep on the inside wall, all those impossible vegetables growing together, that sign that said "Growing Together," which had become something of a town motto, printed on t-shirts and coffee mugs sold at the new visitor's center.
She walked to her car, a Toyota she'd bought from Jim Patterson's grandson, and sat for a moment before starting it. Tomorrow she would be up before dawn to water the greenhouse. Tomorrow Martha would come by with coffee and plans for expanding the lemongrass plot. Tomorrow her daughter would call with questions about business licenses and insurance. Tomorrow the world would continue turning, and Broken Bow, Nebraska, would continue its slow transformation into something nobody could have imagined, something that wasn't perfect but was real, and lived, and true.
But tonight, Linh Nguyen sat in her car in front of her nail salon in the middle of America, and felt the deep satisfaction of soil under her fingernails and friendship in her bones, of roots that had finally, impossibly, found their way down through foreign earth to water.
She drove home through streets she knew by heart, past the Morrison house where Betty was probably working on a quilt that mixed Nebraska stars with Vietnamese lotus flowers, past the Rodriguez bank where Tom was staying late to approve another small business loan, past Dale Hutchinson's dark hardware store with its new taqueria addition, past all the ordinary miracles of a small town that had chosen to grow rather than die.
At home, she walked through her garden in the fading light, checking the tomatoes that Martha had taught her to grow, the water spinach that reminded her of her mother's garden, the marigolds that kept the rabbits away. Everything was growing together, American and Vietnamese, native and immigrant, all in the same soil, all reaching for the same sun.
She thought about calling her daughter, her son, telling them about the day, about the children learning in the garden, about Martha's son secretly looking at houses. But there would be time for that tomorrow, and the next day, and all the days after that. Tonight, she would make herself dinner with vegetables from her garden, vegetables that Martha had helped her grow, and she would eat alone but not lonely, foreign but not stranger, in this place that had become, against all odds and expectations, home.
In the distance, she could hear the sound of trucks on the highway, heading east toward Omaha, west toward the Sandhills, carrying the products of Nebraska farms to the rest of America. Soon, some of those trucks would carry their vegetables too, their impossible garden grown in impossible soil, proof that with enough work and enough faith and enough friendship, anything could grow anywhere.
The stars came out over Broken Bow, the same stars that shone over Saigon and Warsaw and Mexico City, over all the places people came from and all the places they were going. Linh stood in her garden, dirt under her fingernails, hope in her heart, and knew that she had found what she hadn't even known she was looking for: not just a place to live, but a place to grow, not just a business partner but a friend, not just survival but life, abundant and unexpected and good.