The Teeth Dad Waited a Year For

Dad had worn a full upper and lower plate since he was fifty-one. On a Sunday afternoon last December he called me and said, in his dry voice, “Well, Bev, I’ve broke my teeth.” He had dropped the upper on the edge of the bathroom sink and it lay in two clean halves. The lower had been loose for years, because gums shrink, and he had been fighting it with paste and stubbornness. Dr. Hendricks looked at him on the ninth, said both would have to be made over, and wrote down the number.

Dad had the money. He always has the money for what a thing costs, because he is a man who put aside the price of a washing machine before the old one quit. He had four thousand one hundred and fifty dollars set by, from two steers he sold and a certificate of deposit that came due in the fall. “It’s in the account,” he told me. “I’ll go see Tom.”

Two winters before, when his hip was replaced in Mitchell, the bank had drawn up a paper naming my brother Gary as his power of attorney. Gary is fifty-six, the oldest, and he lives four miles from Dad while I live twenty-two. Gary paid the electric bill and the property tax, and he farms Dad’s quarter-section on a cash lease, so he was the man Dad saw most.

For a while Dad made do with the old plates, the lower one clicking against his gums like a loose shoe. By February he had given up on both. He lived on oatmeal, canned soup, mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs, and when I brought a pork chop on Sundays he cut it into pieces smaller than dice and pushed them around his plate. I watched him do it. I told myself it was his age. By August he had lost nineteen pounds, and his good flannel shirt hung off him like it was on a hanger.

The smile went too. My father used to smile with his whole face, teeth first, the way you throw open a door. That year he learned to smile with his mouth shut, a flat line, like a man at a funeral who has been asked to be polite. And in the second week of February he quit going to coffee. “I’m tired of the drive,” he said. The drive is four minutes.

I asked Gary about the teeth three times that spring. Each time he gave me the same answer without looking up from whatever he was fixing. Tom’s booked till fall. The insurance is a mess. I’m working on it. I believed him. Gary taught me to drive a stick shift on the section road behind the Lutheran church when I was fifteen, and he never once hollered when I killed the engine, and in fifty-two years he had never lied to me that I knew of.

When I got to Dad’s, he was in his recliner with the television off, which is how I knew he had been watching the road for me. I made coffee I did not want. I set two cups on the little table between us and sat on the footstool.

“Pop, did you ever get over to see Tom about your teeth?”

“Gary’s handling it.”