The Tenderloin at My Sister’s Window

Mom was eating oatmeal at noon on a Saturday in October, the same as she had eaten it at breakfast, and the same as she would eat it again at supper.

She sat at the kitchen table in the little house on the south side of town, spooning it slow, tipping her head so it went down the side where it didn’t hurt.

I had come by with a sack of apples from the orchard stand on the county road and a loaf of bread from the bakery, the soft white kind she used to love.

I set the bread on the counter and watched her eat, and something in my chest went cold, because I had not really looked at her in a while.

Her wedding ring was spinning on her finger. She had to push it back up past the knuckle with her thumb every time she set the spoon down.

“Mom,” I said. “When did you lose all this weight?”

She waved her hand at me the way she does when she thinks I’m fussing. “I’m fine, Liesl. I’m just not much for eating right now. It’ll come back when the teeth come.”

“The teeth were supposed to come in August.”

“The lab’s backed up,” she said. “Kenna says any week now. She checks on it for me.”

Kenna is my little sister. She is thirty-nine, five years younger than me, and she lives ten minutes from Mom on the other side of the tracks.

I live twenty-five minutes out in the country with my husband Merritt, and I work for the county road department as a flagger, which means I am out the door before daylight from April until the snow flies.

So when Mom had her last teeth pulled back in June, it made sense for Kenna to handle the appointments. That was the plan we all agreed on, sitting at this same table.

Mom had been losing teeth one at a time for years. She is seventy-six. She cooked in the school kitchen for thirty-one years, and she never once took a sick day for her mouth, even when she should have.

By spring there were only a few left, loose and aching, and the dentist in town said it was time. They came out in June, all of them, in one morning.

The plan was simple. Let the gums heal a while, then go to Dr. Kettler in Ottumwa, who has done nothing but dentures for thirty years, and get a full upper and lower set.

Everybody around here calls him the denturist, though he is a regular dentist with his own little lab in the back. People drive in from three counties because he is fair and he is fast.

Medicare doesn’t pay for dentures. Mom’s supplement doesn’t either. So Mom went to the bank and took $1,600 out of her savings, which was most of what she had left after Dad’s funeral eight years ago.

She gave the money to Kenna in an envelope, because Kenna was the one who would drive her and set it up. I remember Mom saying, “You make sure that man gets paid up front, so he doesn’t think we’re the kind who don’t pay.”

That was June. Now it was the middle of October.

“Mom,” I said, “can I see your mouth?”