The Tenderloin at My Sister’s Window

“Well,” he said, “these healed up beautiful. You should have been eating steak since August.”

Mom laughed through her tears at that, and then caught herself, and put her hand back up.

He explained the whole thing to us in plain words, which I appreciated, because I have been talked down to by enough doctors to last me.

First the impressions, that day. Then a bite appointment a few days later, to get the height right so she wouldn’t look like she was chewing on a mouthful of marbles.

Then a try-in, where they’d set the teeth in wax so she could see them and say yes or no before anything was final. Then the last visit, where she’d take them home.

“Two weeks,” he said, “if your mother’s willing to make the drive four times. We do our own lab work here. Nothing goes out.”

“She’s willing,” I said.

“And the cost,” he said, and named it. A full upper and lower, his standard set, $1,600, which was what it had always been. He didn’t raise it a dime for the walk-in.

I set the white envelope on the counter. The woman with the beaded chain counted it slowly, the way they do, and wrote Mom a receipt in pen.

“Paid in full,” she said, and slid it across.

Mom held that receipt in both hands all the way home. She didn’t say much. Near the bridge over the river, she said, “Your dad would have liked that man.”

“He would have,” I said.

I didn’t hear from Kenna that week. I didn’t expect to. I hadn’t told her anything, and Mom hadn’t either.

But it is a small town, and the woman at Dr. Kettler’s front desk has a cousin who goes to Mom’s church, and by Wednesday night prayer meeting it was all over the fellowship hall that Zelda Vrba was finally getting her teeth.

Mom hadn’t been to a church dinner since June. She’d stopped going to Wednesday circle in July. She told the other ladies she was tired, but the truth was she couldn’t sit at a table with a plate in front of her while everybody watched her mash a dinner roll with her tongue.

On Thursday, an old friend of hers named Opal came by with a pan of scalloped potatoes, soft enough to eat with a spoon. Opal and Mom ran the school kitchen together for twenty years.

I was there that afternoon, cleaning out Mom’s gutters. Opal stood at the bottom of my ladder and squinted up at me in the sun.

“Is it true?” she said. “Kenna?”

“It’s true.”

Opal nodded slowly. She didn’t say anything ugly. She just said, “Your mother covered for that girl when she was sixteen and backed into the principal’s car. Never said a word. Some people never stop covering.”

Then she went inside and sat with Mom, and I heard them laughing through the screen, Mom’s hand probably up over her mouth the whole time.

The bite appointment was that Friday. The try-in was the Wednesday after. Each time I took the afternoon off, and each time my foreman said, “Go on. We’ll cover you.”

At the try-in, Dr. Kettler handed Mom a hand mirror with the teeth set in pink wax. She looked at them a long time.

“They look like somebody else’s,” she said doubtfully.