The Teeth Dad Waited a Year For

“Gary called Tom’s office in January and put it off. There’s never been a deposit. The estimate is still sitting in the computer.”

My father said nothing. The clock on the wall, the one Mother bought at the hardware store in 1968, ticked about thirty times. Then he got up, a hand on each arm of the chair, and came back from the bedroom holding his Bible.

He opened it to a place between the Psalms and Proverbs and took out a bank statement folded in thirds. The bank still mails a paper copy to the house, whatever Gary does online. Dad had gone down one line with a carpenter’s pencil. January twenty-first. Transfer out, four thousand one hundred fifty dollars. The account number it went to ended in 3318.

“That’s Gary’s farm account,” I said. I knew it. I had written it on enough birthday checks.

“It is.”

“How long have you known?”

“First week of February, when it came in the mail.” He sat back down. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. “I know what it looks like, Beverly. I know where it went. I signed the paper that lets him. A man can’t sign a paper like that and then holler about what it lets.”

“Pop. That was your teeth.”

“I know what it was.”

“I’m going over there right now.”

“No.”

It was the hardest word I had heard out of him in a year. He said it flat, and then he leaned forward and put his hand over mine, and his hand shook.

“I want a promise from you. No Gary. No sheriff, no lawyer, no scene. You say one word and it quits being family and starts being a case, and that boy has a note at the bank and a wife and a son farming beside him. Once a thing like that is said out loud in this county, it can’t be unsaid. I would rather chew soup till I die.”

“You did chew soup, Pop. For nine months.”

“I did,” he said. “And I’d do ten more. Promise me.”

I promised him. It cost me something to say it, and I meant the exact words. I promised I would not say a word to anyone about where the money went. I did not promise to leave him eating oatmeal.

“Well, what are you going to do?” he said. “Pay for them? You’ve got your own roof to see to.”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’ll know by Monday.”

I told Jim that night at our kitchen table. Jim is a mechanic at the implement dealer, and he has the patience of a man who has spent thirty years waiting on parts, but when I got to the part about the statement he put his fork down and said he would be at Gary’s shop in ten minutes. I said no. I said I had promised.

“Bev, the man took your dad’s teeth.”

“I know what he took.”

I will tell you what I told Jim, because maybe you have wondered it yourself. I looked it up on my phone that night after he went to bed. Every road I could find ended in the same place. A complaint about a power of attorney goes to the county and then to a judge, and from what I could tell it meant months of papers and Dad’s own checking account tied up while strangers decided whose fault it was. He would have had no teeth and no checking account. He would have had a deputy in his kitchen asking whether his own son had stolen from him, and Dad would have said no, and then he would have had to live inside that lie for the rest of his years. I was not going to hand him one.