The Teeth Dad Waited a Year For

My father took off his glasses. He folded them and set them on the table, and for a long minute he looked at his own hands. “I wrote those men down in a green ledger,” he said finally. “Thirty-eight names. I burned it in the burn barrel in ‘ninety-one, so nobody’d ever think they owed me anything.”

“Roy remembers.”

“Roy would.”

“Pop. Every one of them remembers.”

He did not cry. My father does not. But I saw the muscle in his jaw work, and he looked out the window at the machine shed, and I thought that I had never seen a man look so carefully at an empty barnyard.

“Did Gary put in?” he asked.

“No.”

“Good,” he said, and I understood he meant it kindly. “Let him find his own way to it.” Then, after a minute: “Tell Tom Tuesday.”

It took five weeks. A set of dentures is not one visit but a procession of them: the impressions, the bite, the wax try-in, the delivery, the adjustments. I drove him every Tuesday at ten, and each time Renae had the coffee on, and each time Dr. Hendricks stood in the doorway and said, “Walt,” and my father said, “Tom,” and that was all of the conversation that was needed.

The visit I think of most was the wax try-in, the third one. Dr. Hendricks sets the teeth in pink wax first, before the real ones are made, so a man can see how he will look and say whether he wants a longer tooth or a shorter one. He fit the upper and the lower into Dad’s mouth. Then he held up a hand mirror and said, “Take a look, Walt.”

Dad took it. He looked for a long moment at a face I had not seen in almost a year. Then he smiled. He did not decide to. It came up through him, the old door-opening smile, with the whole row of teeth in it, a little crooked at the eyeteeth the way he always had them, because he had asked Tom to keep them that way back in ‘ninety-three.

“Well, I’ll be,” my father said. His voice cracked. “Your mother used to say I smiled like a man who got away with something.”

It was the first time he had said my mother’s name in my hearing since Easter. Dr. Hendricks turned and began to fuss with something on his tray, and I went and stood at the window and looked at the parking lot very hard.

The real teeth came on the last Friday in October. Dr. Hendricks warned us that a new set takes a couple of weeks to learn, that there would be sore spots and clicking and a good deal of cursing, and that Dad should eat soft food until the gums settled. “Eggs,” he said. “Noodles. Anything a baby could manage. Come back Tuesday and I’ll adjust whatever hurts.” My father said he would do as told. He sat in the passenger seat all the way home with his lips pressed shut, and when I glanced at him he was grinning at the windshield.

That night he ate two helpings of Connie’s chicken and rice, and I sat across from him and watched a man chew. I cannot tell you what it is to watch that. It was close to watching my own children walk across a stage.

“I want to go to coffee in the morning,” he said, with his fork in the air. “It’s Saturday. They’ll all be there.”

“I’ll drive you.”

“I’ll drive myself.”