The Teeth Dad Waited a Year For

Dr. Hendricks’s receptionist found my father’s estimate in under a minute, which is how I knew nobody had ever paid it.

“Here we are,” Renae said, and she turned the screen so I could read it. “Walter Reinke. Full upper, full lower, forty-one fifty. Quoted the ninth of December.”

It was the second Friday in September. I had come straight from the school kitchen in Marsden, South Dakota, with my hairnet still stuffed in my coat pocket. I cook for two hundred and ten kids, kindergarten through twelfth grade, and I do not leave a pan of scalloped potatoes for anything short of an emergency. That morning I had handed the ladle to Jolene and told her I would be an hour.

“Is there a deposit on file?” I asked. “A payment of any kind?”

Renae’s face did something small. “No, hon. Your brother called in January and said Walt wanted to wait till spring. We put the lab order on hold. And then, well. Spring came and went.”

“Did my father call?”

“Gary called.”

She looked at me then, and she was kind about it, which was almost worse. “Bev, let me get Dr. Hendricks.”

I sat in the waiting room under a poster of a cartoon molar with my purse on my knees. Dr. Tom Hendricks has had the one dental chair in Marsden since 1989. He made my mother’s partial. He made my father’s first set of teeth. He put the cap on my front tooth after I took a softball to the face in the eighth grade. When he came out with his reading glasses pushed up on his head, he sat down in the chair next to mine, which is not a thing dentists do.

“I should have asked,” he said, before I could get a word out. “A man who has paid his own way for sixty years does not just decide to wait. I took your brother’s word for it, and I have been chewing on that since about March.”

“What does it really cost, Tom?”

“Forty-one fifty. That covers the lab, the six visits, and the adjustments after. And Medicare won’t pay a dime of it, you know that. Not a dime for teeth. I have never understood who wrote that rule.”

I did know it. I had learned it at my father’s kitchen table the winter before, with the Medicare booklet open to the page about what isn’t covered and Dad reading over my shoulder with his lips pressed flat.

I drove out to his place with the radio off. Before I tell you what I found there, you have to see the year he had, because I did not see it clearly myself until that morning.

My father is Walter Reinke, and he is eighty-four years old. He managed the Marsden Farmers Cooperative Elevator for twenty-two years, from 1979 until he retired, and after that he drove in every morning at half past six for coffee. That was twenty-five more years. He missed fewer than thirty mornings in all that time, and I know the number because the men at the table counted once, made a joke of it, and presented him with a mug.

The coffee table sits in the back of the feed office. It is a round oak table that came out of the old bank when the bank closed, with eight chairs that do not match and a Mr. Coffee nobody has cleaned since the Carter administration. A row of nails by the door holds the men’s caps. The men who sit there call themselves the board of directors, and every morning before sunup they settle the price of beans, the weather, and what is wrong with the school board, and to hear them tell it, they have never been wrong about any of it.