The Teeth Dad Waited a Year For

Tuesday afternoon, the women of Trinity Lutheran met in the church basement for circle, as they have met every Tuesday since the Eisenhower years. I am not a woman who asks. But I was drying coffee cups beside Connie Vogel, who has run the circle for nineteen years, and I heard myself say, “Connie, if somebody needed dentures and could not pay, what does the circle do?”

Connie did not look at me. She went on drying a cup. “We’ve got the Good Neighbor tin,” she said. “It’s from the lefse sale and the pie auction. Last year it bought Arlene Fisk her hearing aid batteries and put a furnace part in the Johnson boy’s trailer.” She set the cup in the rack. “It’s got eight hundred and fifty dollars in it right now. Is this for Walt?”

“How did you know?”

“Honey, nobody has seen Walt Reinke smile since Valentine’s Day. We’ve been wondering when someone would say something.”

She did not ask me a single question after that. She went to the cupboard over the coffee urn, took down a Folgers can with a slit in the lid, and put it in my hands, and the can was heavier than a can that size ought to be. “We don’t need a reason for teeth,” she said. “Nobody in this circle’s ever needed a reason for teeth.”

By Thursday night five casseroles had come to Dad’s back door, and every one of them was something a man could eat without a tooth in his head. Chicken and rice. Baked oatmeal. Scalloped potatoes, soft as pudding. A pan of egg noodles with butter. Pastor Mike Larsen came by himself on Friday and sat with my father for an hour and a half, and when I asked Dad afterward what they had talked about, he said, “Pheasants.” That is all. Nobody mentioned money, and nobody mentioned Gary.

I took the cap and the Folgers can to Dr. Hendricks on Friday at noon. I put them on Renae’s counter next to a check of my own for a hundred and forty dollars, which was what I had after I counted what the other two came to. “That’s twenty-seven ten, and eight-fifty, and a hundred forty,” I said. “I need to know if it’s enough.”

Renae was already doing it on her adding machine. Dr. Hendricks came to the counter and stood beside her and read the tape.

“Thirty-seven hundred,” he said. “You’re four fifty short.”

“I can find it.”

“No, you can’t, and you don’t need to.” He took the pencil from behind his ear and drew a line through something on the estimate. “The lab fee is four hundred and fifty. I’m eating it. I should have asked Walt myself in January, and I didn’t, and that one’s mine to carry.” He looked at me over his glasses. “You tell your father it’s an old-customer discount. He’ll know it isn’t, but he’ll have the manners not to say.”

Getting my father to go was the hard part, and I will tell it plainly.

I laid it out at his kitchen table on Saturday, with the rolls I had brought, and I told him the whole of it, the cap and the tin and Tom’s pencil. I did not say Gary’s name once. I watched his face while I talked, and I saw it go from pride to something raw, and then to something I had not expected.

“I won’t take a man’s charity,” he said.

“It’s not charity, Pop. Roy says it’s a note come due.”

“Roy Tessmer talks too much.”

“Roy says in ‘eighty-five you told the board to find another manager.”