The Oak Table That Paid for Her Braces

She just put a hand on Maddie’s cheek on her way back out. Her hand was dry and warm and smelled like Jergens lotion.

“Your mother,” she said to Maddie, “is the strongest woman on this street. And I have lived on this street fifty-one years.”

Then she went home. Maddie ate three lemon bars standing at the counter, and I let her.

Friday I took my lunch break early and drove the forty minutes to Mankato.

I paid Dr. Halvorsen’s office the $1,200 in cash at the front window, and the woman behind the glass counted it twice and wrote me a receipt by hand because the printer was jammed.

“Monday at nine,” she said. “She can eat soft food that night. Tell her to stock up on mashed potatoes.”

I put the other $100 from the table in the coffee can above the fridge. That covered most of the first monthly payment. The $600 I had saved went back into the checking account where it belonged.

The weekend went by quietly. Maddie was at a friend’s Saturday night.

I worked a half day and cleaned the house and moved two folding chairs and a card table from the basement into the dining room, so at least we’d have a place to set the mail.

I didn’t hear from Shane. I didn’t post anything. I didn’t call anyone.

I told my sister on the phone, and she said, “Good for you,” and then she said, “Oh, Jess, his mother’s table,” and I said I knew.

Monday morning I drove Maddie to Mankato. She was quiet the whole way. She had her earbuds in, but I could tell from the little white wire that nothing was playing.

I sat in the waiting room for an hour and forty minutes reading a fishing magazine somebody had left behind. I learned more about walleye jigs than I will ever need.

When they brought her out, she had her lips pressed together tight. She had a little plastic bag with wax and a travel toothbrush and a pamphlet about what not to eat.

“Let me see,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Bug.”

“They feel huge. I look like a robot.”

The assistant laughed kindly and said they all say that, and that by Thursday she wouldn’t even notice them.

Maddie didn’t look in the mirror by the front desk. She walked right past it with her eyes on the floor.

We stopped at the Dairy Queen on the way home because the pamphlet said cold things help. She ate a vanilla cone with her lips barely open, careful as a cat. She still didn’t smile.

That evening I was making mashed potatoes, the real kind with milk and butter, when a car door shut out front.

I looked out the kitchen window and my heart turned over. It was a silver Buick LeSabre, about twenty years old and clean as the day it left the lot.

There is only one woman in the county who drives that car, and she drives it to church, the grocery store, and her sister’s in Owatonna, and nowhere else.

It was Bev.

She got out slowly. Bev is seventy-six. She had a hip replaced two years ago and she still walks like she’s checking the ground before each step.

She had an envelope in one hand, a long white business envelope. She came up my three front steps slower than I had ever seen her walk, holding the rail.