by Amelia Gray
“Aileen.”
She stirred the tea in the thermos with a tiny silver spoon, which she slipped into her apron pocket. She reached into her lap and held up a pear. The fruit’s colors seemed too bright against her hand, but he accepted it and placed it on the porch. “I saw you walking in the park earlier,” she said. “You seemed happy. It looked like you wanted company.”
The rocking chair she was sitting in had dug small grooves into the porch over the years, little imprints in the wood that made the chair rock on a track. It made it so the seated individual could rock back and forth within the track, but if he or she tried to shift the chair in another direction—to face the top of the street instead of the corner—the chair would find its groove again and slide back into place. “Who were those men?” she asked.
“Friends.”
“You should eat that pear.”
“Thank you. I just drank a lot of water, though.”
“They are delicious this time of year.”
“Too much water, really.”
She looked toward the driveway. “Frances’s car is gone,” she said, running her fingers along the upper hem of her salon apron at the point where it tied around her neck. “I brought you some pears,” she said. “You have a lovely home.”
He watched the mechanism of Aileen’s leg from his position beside the porch. “City took the car.”
“I’ve been thinking about Frances,” Aileen said. She rocked with one leg crossed over the other. The toe of her sneaker touched the ground. As she flexed and pointed her toe, David saw the calf muscle engage. “I keep thinking about Frances. We used to drink a cup of coffee before the customers showed up in the morning. She brought different types of nondairy creamers for us to try.”
David remembered his own morning routine at the dental office. “I miss her too.”
“Because I have a lactose issue.” She touched one of the pears in its bag with the tip of her sneaker. “It’s unlike Frances to go out the way she did.”
“I guess endings don’t always follow the story,” David said. “Some people don’t spend a day of their lives in a hospital until those last two weeks. Everything is different at the end in a way that hastens its coming.”
“Still, it was unlike her to go outside in the middle of winter, wearing what she wore.” Aileen pointed and flexed and sipped her tea. “She wasn’t wearing any shoes, right? She was out there barefoot, in the middle of January, snow on the ground.”
“How did you find that out?”
She waved her hand, scattering steam. “It’s all online. I was remembering the time I went out to get the paper in my slippers and they soaked through. I gave myself pneumonia. Right then. I could feel the virus enter my body through my foot. It was the worst feeling of my life, what I remember of it. Every day, if I was aware of my surroundings, I actively wanted to die. Frances brought me movies she rented from the library and told me to keep them as long as I wanted. She sat with me. And something got her out there in the snow without slippers on?” She held her face upward. “I’m messing up my face,” she said.
“She didn’t have pneumonia.”
“I know. Athlete’s foot, cedar allergy, hypothermia, wounds, but no pneumonia.” She saw his look. “Police files, online.”
“Why would the police release that information?”
“You’d have to ask them, David. Probably to get the national media involved. I figure we haven’t had a satellite truck in town since the last Harvest Fest. Now there’s a spectacle to get people interested, show the men and women of our police force frowning and shaking their heads. They have this video of your house all lit up at night. It looks beautiful. They keep showing it on a loop.”
“They’re filming my house at night?”
“It really does look beautiful, you should check it out. A real winter scene, cozy. Right at the end it shows you walking past one of the front windows.” She pointed. “That one, I think.”
David wrapped one hand around the porch rail’s column. He determined that with the correct angle of approach, he could reach through the columns, grab Aileen firmly by the sneaker, and pull her out of the chair in one motion. “This is an invasion of privacy,” he said. “They’re trying to smoke me out.”
“That would suggest you were hiding something, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“Well then, they’re only curious.”
“It doesn’t make sense that what they’re doing would change based on what I’m doing.”
“Smoke is in the eye of the beholder.” Aileen laughed. “I just came up with that. Would you believe?”
David looked at the bag of pears. They seemed different from the ones he had just bought, somehow smoother and more perfect, as if they had been created in a laboratory. He was worried that she would want to watch him eat one. He had his suspicions about Aileen.
“You have such a beautiful home,” Aileen said. “How much did you pay for it?”
“My parents dealt with some of the mortgage,” David said. “We were taking care of my father.”
“What a treat to live in a place like this.”
“We would rather have had our own house. It was good to help out when we could.”
“Well, I’m sure you were a big help,” Aileen said, standing. “I believe it’s time for my nap. I’ll leave you to your afternoon in your beautiful home.”
“Have a safe trip,” David said, watching the woman walk away. She left the bag of pears on the porch. He considered leaving them there but feared she might return and see that he had. He picked up the bag and took it through the kitchen and out the back door. One by one, he threw the pears overhand into the woods.
40.
DAVID HAD CARED for every tooth of the ones he loved. When he visited his mother, he brought his dental tools in a leather bag and performed a cursory exam with her lying down on a couch in the common area. He could wheedle and plead and get his father in for cleanings every eighteen to twenty months, but Franny kept her yearly appointment. Her teeth were the healthiest he had seen, including gum-model sets in brochures he displayed in the office. They looked and felt stronger than the resin models on the shelf. He would observe her X-rays after she left, experiencing the keen sense of pride one might feel with a child. He considered framing them in the office, but he knew that other patients would feel envy toward the perfect teeth and might even blame David’s expert care for the sugar and neglect that brought them in to begin with.
His father’s teeth were a model of such neglect. A lifetime of dental abandon had started early, when David’s grandmother claimed that toothpaste was an unnecessary and vulgar expense. No matter how advanced the dental water jets and waxed flosses and prescription pastes David pushed upon the man, his father’s teeth aged poorly with him. David used to watch his father breathing through his mouth in the chair by the window, cultivating scores of bacteria in the deepening crevices, parts per million untold, the invaders shoring up in preparation to go to work that night when the man would lay his obviously unbrushed mouth on the pillow, smacking his lips, saliva rushing forth and infusing the mouth with the moist warmth of an incubator, the perfect environment for a healthy population of ruin. “The dental profession is a farce of control,” he said when his son tried to show him the problems.
David had started to remove his father’s teeth at the beginning of his career, from when he took his first trained peek into his father’s mouth. That first tooth, a maxillary third, rotten through the root, a bruise on the X-ray. The hygienist leaned back in her chair and looked at David wordlessly, ticking the suction in the direction of the spot on the light box after David had already seen it, of course, the blemish an embarrassment on his young career, the father of a dental professional experiencing such advanced molar ruin. He cleared his appointments for the rest of the afternoon and performed the procedure immediately.
His father provided little input beyond what David suspected, wh
ich was that he didn’t want a metal rod in the jawbone, an exact copy replacing the rotten tooth. The man waved it off even when David told him it would last a lifetime. He reminded his son how old he was, cited the cost of titanium. “Decay comes for free,” he said. “Any further installation is vanity.” There would be no titanium, but David insisted on making a bridge for his father, placing the Novocain with a practiced hand, filing down each tooth on either side, making the impressions. He installed a flipper to take the place of the missing tooth while the bridge was being made. His hygienist handed off the tools and watched with her hands folded over her stomach. David’s gloved hand pulled back a dry tuck of skin at the corner of his father’s lip. His father’s eyes were closed for the duration. David saw the other problems in the mouth, years of accumulated calculus building like cedar shingles at the base of each tooth, imperfections despite regular cleanings, which could lead to a life of discomfort, agony even, the kind that could silence a man in his chair.
Through his father, David learned that the final years of a human’s dental development were a stanching of unstoppable decomposition. The entire practice of dentistry had more of a natural cycle to it when a life span was closer to fifty years. When medical science evolved to carry the lives of individuals past their eightieth birthdays, dentists were the ones tasked with maintaining the appearance of healthy teeth against the mounting years. They became architects in those last thirty years and artists in the last ten, describing the curve of a tooth and its natural pigment with molds and materials. They were cosmetic artists, sculptors, possessing an accomplished level of imagination and skill. David took pride in his ability to see the perfection in every flawed mouth.
41.
IT SEEMED REASONABLE to assume that Franny was somewhere in the world. If it was possible for her to be contained within a canister of ash on the table, it seemed equally possible that she was taking a walk in the neighborhood, or that she was out for a drive, or perhaps standing in line at the grocery store with faceless individuals who might fail to recognize the miracle that stood beside them holding a gallon of milk.
David was sure that if Franny was outside, she would be pleased to learn that he had been out looking for her. In the event that she arrived while he was out looking, he left a note at home, asking her to stay. He wrote that if she was there, she shouldn’t leave—that he was there, that if she was there, he would find her. He folded the note and placed it in an envelope on her pillow, in their bed.
He found a pair of quarters in the tray where he had once deposited his keys and wallet daily. There was a small handful of them in a coffee cup on top of the refrigerator. In the junk drawer, he found the roll they used when the dryer was broken and they had to go to the laundromat. He thought about that warm room.
He collected enough money and walked to the bus stop. There, he found a person lying on a pile of broken-down cardboard. The person was wrapped in a mound of damp clothes. The stop occupied its own terminal space of sidewalk, jutting up against a guardrail and the stretch of road, meaning nobody would ever walk by unless they were waiting for the bus, and then they wouldn’t walk past the bench to the corner, where the person had arranged or found the cardboard pile, which looked like it might not travel easily. It was a lonely corner of sidewalk. The person had spread plastic bags like a flotilla under the cardboard, keeping it dry. David could not determine if the person was a man or a woman. The person didn’t move when David sat nearby on the bench. A storm was coming and the air was quiet.
He looked at the person. He put his gloved hand over his face and rubbed his lips with the fabric. “Have you seen my wife?” he asked through the glove.
A wintry mix fell from the sky. Wet turds of snow landed at his feet. The person’s hair held a fuzzy corona of ice. There was no evidence to suggest that the person had a home.
It felt like a miracle to spend real time outside in the snow. There had been snowfall for months, but David had watched most of it from inside. As the season had progressed, the first flakes stuck and vanished into uniformity, then car tires made ribbon tracks down the road, then the general cover connected the world in a formless mass. He thought of the formless mass that had been created by the shape of his wife under a tarp, emergency workers chatting around her like guests at a party. After she had been there, it seemed easy enough that she could be anywhere.
“This atmosphere is a miracle,” he said to the tires of the arriving bus. It was not totally clear that the person was alive. “The bus is here,” he said to the person, whose hands were wrapped in plastic bags. “The bus is here,” he said, waiting for the door to open and then reaching for the stair’s rail, depositing five quarters, and waving off the transfer.
The laundromat was crowded with people doing their last loads before the storm hit. They sat with their backs to the window. Washers rattled within their prescribed spaces and dryers spun, radiating heat into the room in an inefficient way that was still comforting to the people, who removed scarves and heavy coats and put spare quarters into the pinball machine in the corner or bought small, bright packages of laundry detergent or dryer sheets from a vending machine, or orange sodas from another vending machine, or peanuts and chocolate from a bulk vending machine by the door. The room was dominated by machines that operated by quarters, and this pleased David, who felt like a wealthy man with his pocket full of the land’s standard currency. He bought a packet of fabric softener and a handful of peanuts that, upon closer inspection, were cashews.
He examined the face of each person in the small room, but none of them resembled the woman he had seen the first night. The laundromat wasn’t the kind of place where a person put down roots.
Sitting there, David came to the slow realization that he had not brought any clothes of his own to wash. It seemed likely that soon enough, the attendant might notice he wasn’t using any machines, was simply sitting in a plastic chair watching the kids play pinball, and the attendant might call the police. The thought made David nervous in a way that was immediately actionable. He stood and walked to the other side of the room, where a folding table was ringed by men and women arranging clean clothes into baskets.
David approached one woman, who noticed him and was already shaking her head at the look on his face.
“I’d love to help you fold your clothes,” he said.
“No,” she said. “No, honey.”
He looked at the woman next to the first woman, her friend it seemed, because they looked at each other and then the friend spoke. “I’m not going to let a crazy man fold my clothes,” she said. The women laughed, and David laughed too. “No offense,” she said.
“You don’t have to be crazy to fold clothes,” he said. “But it helps.”
“I don’t care how crazy you are, as long as you’re working for me,” said a third woman, so small beside the folding table that it seemed as if she would be more comfortable underneath. “Come here,” she said, and David saw that it was the woman from the first night, Shelly, and she was wearing earth tones again, and he had not seen her from across the room because she was much smaller than he remembered and had been hidden by the machines.
“How are you?” David asked.
Shelly pushed a pile of warm shirts over to him and he picked one up. “Sick and tired,” she said, glancing at him. “You know, you could probably stand to do a load or two while you’re here. I have some spare shirts if you need.”
“I’m fine.”
She shrugged and returned to folding. “Some days I’m mostly sick, and then it hits me how tired I am. Opposite sides of the same rolling coin.”
The shirt he picked up was long-sleeved. He held the collar and flipped the sleeves back. “I feel more tired lately,” he said. “People keep coming to my house.”
“Not like that,” she said. David widened his grip on the shoulders, but she shook her head. “Here,” she said, digging into a bag at her feet and hauling out a clipboard nearly the size of her torso. She t
ook the shirt and flattened it on the table, positioned the board in the center, and folded the sleeves inward. She tucked the shirtsleeves back, flipped the board over, and slid it out in a smooth motion, leaving a perfectly folded shirt.
“I’ll try again,” David said, reaching for the folded shirt.
She snapped it off the table and laid it in her rolling basket. “You’ll find no utility in going backward,” she said. “Move forward.” She prodded the pile.
He took another shirt, positioned the clipboard, made a few false starts with the sleeves, but placed them, flipped the shirt over, and removed the board.
The woman clapped once. “There you go,” she said. “Soon you’ll be doing it without the board. Soon you won’t even need your eyes. There’s a goal.”
The two friends on the other side of the table snickered but stopped abruptly when the small woman pointed at them. “You won’t always have your eyes,” the woman said. “You lose everything you love in the order in which you love it.” David finished another shirt and the woman patted his arm. “You’re so kind to help,” she said. “So kind, without expecting anything in return.”
He felt kind, though her words made him wonder what he could expect in return. It was possible this woman knew something about Franny, had seen or spoken with her on one of Franny’s trips to the laundromat. He pictured his wife with a load of towels from the salon, a bag stuffed full of curtains requiring the delicate cycle. He imagined her measuring cupfuls of detergent and bleach into the industrial-size washer, loading quarters into the machine, and settling down in one of the yellow plastic chairs with a magazine advertising a pill you could take to make your eyelashes grow faster.
“The expression on your face,” Shelly said. “I could eat it.”
David held up his hand to the offer. They folded shirts while he thought about Franny propping her feet on a rolling cart or wiping spilled detergent from a machine with a towel and dropping that towel into the wash with the rest. Franny’s eyes shone when she saw him folding from across the room. “You moron,” Franny said, smiling, beatific. She was holding an incisor in an oversize antique gold tooth extractor.
