The Tenderloin at My Sister’s Window

“They’ll look like yours by Christmas,” he said. “Everybody says that the first time. You’ve been looking at an empty mouth for four months. Give your face a minute to catch up.”

He made one small change. He moved one of the front teeth just a hair crooked, the way her own had been, because I’d brought him an old picture from Mom’s seventieth birthday.

When he showed her, Mom laughed out loud, a real one, the first I’d heard in months. “There’s my tooth,” she said. “That’s the one Kenna knocked loose with a swing set in 1992.”

Then she stopped laughing. And then, after a moment, she smiled again, quieter.

The last visit was the Wednesday after that. Sixteen days after I’d sat on the shoulder of that county road with my phone in my hand.

I’d worked the morning on a culvert job and left at noon. I didn’t stop to change. I just tossed my hard hat in the back and drove to Mom’s in my orange vest and gray hoodie with road dust on my boots.

She was waiting on the porch with her purse already on her arm. Coral cardigan. White blouse. She’d done her curls again.

“You look nice,” I said.

“I’m getting my teeth,” she said, like that explained it, and it did.

At the office, Dr. Kettler seated her in the chair and fit the teeth one at a time, the top and then the bottom, pressing them into place with his thumbs and asking her to bite down on a little strip of blue paper.

He checked them three times, filed one spot at the side, and checked again. Then he took off his gloves and handed her the mirror.

Mom looked into it for a long time without saying anything. Then her hand came up and covered her mouth. Out of habit. The way it had for four months.

And then, slowly, she took it away.

She smiled into that mirror. A real, wide smile, with every new tooth showing, and that one front tooth just a little crooked.

I had to go out to the hall. I stood by the water fountain with my back to the wall and my eyes shut, and the woman with the beaded glasses came out and stood next to me and didn’t say a word, just patted my arm twice and went back to her desk.

When we got back in my truck it was a little after two, and the sun was coming slanted and gold across the bean stubble the way it does in October.

That evening she ate scrambled eggs and a slice of the soft white bread, the crust and all, and she called me after to tell me so. Dr. Kettler had told her to start soft for a day and then work up.

The next afternoon, Thursday, I got off at three. I didn’t change. I drove straight to Mom’s in my vest and hoodie with my hair still up in its clip, and she was waiting on the porch.

“You hungry?” I asked.

Mom thought about it. “Dr. Kettler said a sandwich was fine if I took my time,” she said.

“You know what I want,” she said. “I want a tenderloin.”

I knew which tenderloin she meant. There is only one place in our town that makes them right: pounded thin, breaded by hand, fried till the edges curl, and so much bigger than the bun that you have to eat around it before you can pick it up.