Open Wide

by Saul Tanpepper

  After I got out of the hospital, I finally broke down and went to one of those shelters. You can talk about pride and shit all you want, but for me those things had long since gone out the broken window. All I had left was my name, and even that wasn’t worth a hunk of moldy bread.

  So you can imagine my surprise when I ran into Dean there, at the shelter. And he wasn’t down on his luck, either. He was actually helping out. Here was a guy I’d thought was a scourge on the world, unredeemable, a stain on humanity. And he’s doing charity work, for freaking chrissake! It just about blew my mind. But that wasn’t the half of it.

  “It was Kerry Anne,” he said. “Remember her?”

  He must’ve misinterpreted the blank stare I gave him. I mean, I’d tried to forget her—tried to forget them—right? But how do you forget the worst thing to ever happen to you and the person responsible for it?

  “From high school?” he added, unhelpfully.

  I gave him an impatient wave. “So she converted you, eh?”

  He laughed and nodded. “Made me see my faults.”

  I almost laughed with him. The old Dean, who never gave a shit about anyone, serving soup to lowlifes. It was perfect. I mean, sure, I hated that I was one of those lowlifes, but there was something so…so karmic about the whole thing. The guy who used to be able to talk his way out of doing anything for anyone else had been reduced to this. Even the slight lisp he’d picked up was perfect.

  I didn’t try to stop the bitterness from filling me. I felt like I was entitled.

  “We’re still married,” he added.

  I think my jaw must’ve fallen about forty stories.

  “You and Kerry?” I said, incredulous. “Happily married?” I couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to see it.

  “Like I said, she showed me the error of my ways.”

  He told me he worked a few days a week at the juvy center helping out troubled youths, showing them how to fix cars. I told him I thought he’d gone on to law school—just a bit of news I’d caught in the wind some years after graduation, on one of my trips back to see my folks—and he shrugged and said that he had. He’d even opened up his own law practice. “We do a lot of pro bono work.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that. This wasn’t the same Dean I’d known and hated for all these. And I wanted to still hate him, but I found it wasn’t so easy anymore, even when I took into account that he’d apparently succeeded with Kerry Anne, whereas I hadn’t. I say apparently because I could see it in his eyes, something suspicious, something forced. And looking around then, I could tell that he felt out of place there at the shelter, despite all his do-good talk. It wasn’t in-your-face obvious, but I could tell that the other helpers avoided him.

  “Children?” I asked.

  He seemed startled, then quickly dismissed it with a shake of his head, saying, “We can’t.” And I knew this was a sensitive subject for him. Maybe he was impotent or maybe Kerry Anne was infertile. Either way, it wasn’t a subject to joke about, even given the unusual circumstances we found ourselves in.

  “We manage,” he continued, “Ker and I. It’s tough sometimes, you know. This charity work doesn’t pay the bill collectors, of course, but it has to be done.”

  “What?” I said. I’d been drifting.

  “We all have debts to pay, right?”

  I hesitated, then nodded. Was he referring to my own troubles years back? Was he saying I hadn’t paid them in full?

  “God knows I have debts to pay,” he murmured, almost to himself.

  He looked up suddenly and his own demeanor changed, brightened. “So, what are you doing here, Kurt? I thought you went off to play football or something in college. I figured you’d be playing pro by now. You have to excuse me, but I don’t follow sports. Kerry Anne, you know. She was never much into that.”

  “You never had much aptitude for it, either,” I said, and we both laughed. It felt familiar and good.

  I told him what I’d been doing for the past fifteen years. I told him everything, actually. I don’t know why. Maybe I was lonely and nostalgic for the old friendship. Maybe I’d picked up something in the way he spoke or sat, a clue that things weren’t exactly as he presented them. Anyway, it all just spilled out of me, like a disease I needed to be cleansed of. Or maybe it was hope. Seeing him was like a revelation that even the worst of us can still somehow find a way to make it to the light, to do good and all that crap.

  I confessed that I’d never expected him and Kerry Anne to last. I even told him I felt a little jealous. By then, of course, the renewed connection had dulled my anger—not all of it, but enough so that it no longer controlled me. All that was left was mostly this sense of remorse, of missed opportunities.

  “I admit, Kurt,” he said, breathing deeply, “it hasn’t been easy. You know what I was like back then.” I nodded. “First thing Kerry Anne told me when we started seeing each other was that I would have to change.” He clicked his teeth—another annoying little nervous habit he seemed to have picked up. “In fact, she made it a condition.”

  “Made what a condition?”

  But he didn’t answer. “You got a raw deal, Kurt. I’m sorry about that.”

  “So, she told you what happened? The whole thing? The truth?” And when he nodded I felt myself get angry all over again. I mean, I’d suspected he knew, but here he was admitting it himself. “So you knew it was all a lie! Why didn’t you say something at the time?”

  “Would you have?”

  I snapped my mouth closed.

  He shrugged. “Besides, Kurt, it was all settled. I thought you’d be…I thought you’d recover. You always did.”

  I chewed on that for a moment. The past is the past, I told myself. But I couldn’t keep the spite from my voice. “So she threatened to—what?—ruin you if you so much as tried anything with her?”

  He looked away, then back. He started to laugh.

  After a moment, I began to laugh, too. I said, “Well, you turned out all right, so that counts for something. Good old Kerry Anne.”

  “Yeah, good old Kerry Anne.”

  “I’m glad for you both.”

  “Listen,” he told me, and I knew by the way he said it that he was wanting to change the subject. “Why don’t you bring your car by? I’ll have the kids fix it right up, free of charge.”

  “You’d do that? No hard feelings? I mean, after what happened between us and Kerry Anne and…”

  He laid a hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s in the past, man. And I’m sure Kerry Anne wouldn’t forgive me for not offering.”

  I could see that. So it really wasn’t Dean making the offer, it was Kerry Anne. And that’s when I knew: he was afraid of her! But then he surprised me by giving me twenty bucks out of his own pocket. “For gas,” he said. “And…whatever.” And I knew that was at least from him, and I was touched by the gesture. I promised I would come back.

  “I’ll share another bowl with you before I have to go,” he said, urging a second helping of soup into my hands. We sat together in silence, he half-heartedly sipping his broth while I chewed on the stringy bits of chicken. Neither of us said anything. Each of us was lost in his own thoughts.

  Before we were done, he got a call on his cell, and I could tell by the look on his face, even before he’d pulled the phone out of his pocket, that it was Kerry Anne.

  “I gotta take this, Kurt. Sit tight; I’ll be right back.”

  He hurried off to one side of the shelter, far enough away that I could hear his voice but not make out any of the words. He glanced over once or twice before finishing the call and returning.

  “That was—”

  “Kerry Anne,” I said, once more unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. “Yeah, I figured. Did you tell her I said hi?”

  He took a deep breath and shrugged. “Listen, before I go…” He mumbled something and I had to ask him to repeat it. “It’s your breath, Kurt.” He was obviously embarrassed to bring it up, probably as emba
rrassed as I was hearing how bad he thought it was. I knew it was bad, but you never want to hear those kinds of things out loud, not from friends or former friends; not even from former enemies. Strangers can criticize you and it usually won’t mean shit, but when it’s someone you shared a big part of your life with, then…

  “When’s the last time you brushed?”

  I told him toothpaste was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

  He reached into his wallet, and for a second I thought he was going to hand me another twenty. Instead, he pulled out a small rectangle of paper. “Here’s the number to my dentist.”

  I glanced quickly at it—KM DENTISTRY, LLC—before stuffing it into my back pocket.

  “They take a lot of charity cases.” Except he didn’t use the word charity. He called it civic service, but I could tell he meant charity. “They’re just around the corner, in the Carcher Building. At least let them take a look inside. Let them do a cleaning. They’ll tell you if there are any problems you need to have fixed.”

  I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any problems and said so. I’d always had really good teeth, healthy gums, never any cavities. The bad breath was just because I hadn’t brushed in a while. Hadn’t been eating very well, either, if we’re being totally honest about it.

  He had to have heard the irritation in my voice, but he ignored it. He patted me on the shoulder, gave me a wink, and told me to go and get the cleaning. After he left, I almost felt like crying.

  I stayed a few nights at the shelter and left when the weather warmed up again, but I didn’t cross paths with Dean after that. To be honest, I was glad about it. Something about seeing him, talking with him, had made me uncomfortable. The more I reflected on it, the stronger the feeling grew.

  After I returned to my truck, I spent those twenty dollars on food and, I’m ashamed to say, a bottle of cheap whiskey. The money got me enough ramen and cheese to last a couple weeks. I collected spring rainwater in the tarp spread out across the bed of the truck, used it to boil the noodles for soup, chased it with the alcohol, which did a fair job of also keeping me warm.

  I probably never would have taken Dean up on his suggestion of seeing the dentist if I hadn’t bitten down on a piece of gravel and chipped a molar. After the initial pain, the thing seemed fine, except when I drank something cold or hot. After a few days though, it started feeling like someone was digging around inside my mouth with a blowtorch. It was this constant ache, night and day, and I finally had to concede that it was something I could no longer ignore.

  Even so, I held off calling the number on that card. The idea of accepting that kind of charity seemed somehow indecent. It wasn’t like getting a bowl of soup when you were so hungry that your hands would shake like aspen leaves in a wind storm and your shoes were practically falling off your feet from being so loose. I’d always thought of dental work as one of those optional healthcare benefits, probably because I’d never had problems with my teeth before.

  But that wasn’t the only reason I’d resisted taking Dean’s offer. That weird uneasy feeling I’d had since seeing him that day at the shelter? Well, it stuck to me like a bad odor coming from the bottom of my shoe, and it seemed to get worse whenever I thought about seeing the dentist. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but deep down I knew something wasn’t quite right. Call it a gut instinct. Call it the old competitive distrust coming back. Call it shame or embarrassment or even spite. But whatever it was, the pain finally got to the point where none of it mattered anymore. Besides, it wasn’t like I had pressing engagements to attend to elsewhere.

  I stopped first at the soup kitchen, hoping to find Dean there. I wanted to ask him some questions, which I should’ve the first time, but I was told he hadn’t been there in a couple weeks. Maybe if he had been, things would have turned out differently. For me, anyway. I don’t know. Him? I think I knew that ship had already sailed.

  Anyway, I soon found myself standing in the lobby of the Carcher Building, all glass and steel around me and the fragrant aroma of fresh baked sweets drifting out from the coffee shop. My stomach was empty, growling bitterly at the cruelty of it; my chipped molar throbbed so badly that I couldn’t even swallow the soup I’d been offered just an hour earlier.

  I found KM DENTISTRY, LLC on the directory and proceeded up to the fourth floor.

  When the elevator doors opened, I was so shocked at how nice the place was that at first I thought I had gotten off on the wrong floor. Then I started to wonder how a place like this could do so well taking charity cases. I must’ve had the wrong dental office. But the receptionist—Mary, I think her name was, or Mindy—was real nice and she told me they’d been expecting me. I don’t know how they could have, but I brushed it out of my mind, figuring it for something they said to set people’s minds at ease, people like me. She said they could fit me in right then if I had the time.

  If I had the time? I had all the time in the world, and a tooth that was threatening to cut it short if I had to wait much longer.

  I suppose if she’d made the appointment for later in the week, or even later that same day, I might’ve chickened out and never gone back. Maybe. There were ways to get painkillers on the street. I’d never resorted to them, but it’s like I said: things were quickly going from bad to worse, and I strongly suspected hell was just over the horizon.

  I often think about all that as I sit here warming my hands on my bowl of soup I shouldn’t complain. At least I can enjoy the measly bits of meat in it.

  As it was, I didn’t even have a chance to think twice before they were ushering me into a seat in the back office, one of those flashy nice examination rooms with the ultraclean, starkly bright, stainless steel equipment. They started right in with taking my x-rays.

  I was told to relax while the doctor—that’s what they called the dentist, which seemed a bit pretentious—took a look at the pictures.

  So I was lying there with this twenty pound lead vest on me because they’d forgotten to take it off and admiring this nice poster taped to the ceiling—a basketful of kittens spilling out of it—when I heard the door open and someone come in.

  There was the usual sound of shuffling of papers, then: “Kurt?” I stretched my neck back to see, but the owner of that voice was standing just out of my line of sight. “Kurt Harris, is that you? Son of a gun, it really is you!”

  She was dressed in a white lab coat, and even though she was wearing a blue surgical mask, I didn’t need to see her face to recognize her.

  “Kerry Anne.”

  Truth be told, I wasn’t really all that surprised. KM Dentistry. Kerry Anne’s last name had been Malvern. Deep down I’d already figured it out, and so that would explain the uneasiness I’d been feeling the past few weeks. As far as being ashamed that she was seeing me like this, there was a little of that. But, Dean would’ve told her about me being down on my luck; showing up didn’t do anything but prove what she already would have known.

  I did, however, derive some pleasure knowing she hadn’t taken Dean’s name when they’d married.

  “So, you’re a dentist now?” I said. Duh.

  She smiled forgivingly. “I saw the name on the file, Kurt, but I didn’t, you know, make the connection until I saw you. I see so many cases a day that I sometimes just go on autopilot after a while.”

  “Dean didn’t tell you I’d be coming in?”

  Her face tightened, but didn’t answer. Instead, she wiggled a pair of fingers at the top of her head, changing the subject. “You’re…”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I got my father’s baldness.”

  She immediately winced. She must’ve realized bringing my parents up would cause some resentment on my part. I’d forgiven her years ago, but she wouldn’t know that. “Sorry to hear about them,” she mumbled. “They didn’t…”

  Deserve it?

  No, I didn’t either, but I didn’t say what I was thinking.

  I had every reason to be bitter, but for some reason I can’t expla
in, seeing her, just being in her presence, made me forget it. Maybe it was the genuine warmth in her smile, at least what I could see of it in her eyes.

  “I went back to the shelter this morning,” I said, “but they told me Dean hadn’t been there in a while.”

  She stopped, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees.

  “He…sometimes forgets.”

  It seemed like a strange thing to say, and I sensed that there were issues between them that Dean hadn’t stated outright when we’d talked. I had, nevertheless, picked up on them, and now I was convinced I was right. Not everything was as primrose perfect in their little world as Dean had made it seem.

  She excused herself and moved out of sight for a moment. I could hear her behind me, collecting instruments, washing her hands. When she returned it was minus the lab coat and suddenly, despite all my defenses, despite whatever bitterness I should’ve held for her all these years, I found myself falling for her once again. I wanted her. Dear god, I wanted her badly.

  Was I crazy to think such a thing?

  She was still very attractive. Maybe even more than when I’d last seen her. And this wasn’t just because I was seeing her through the eyes of a man who no longer possessed any hope or prospects or dignity, but as a man who had finally grown out of his uncontrolled teenage passions and awkwardness. I could now appreciate beauty with an objective eye, as something to be admired. Kerry Anne had grown into a beautiful woman.

  Back in high school she’d had this impenetrable aura of girlish innocence about her. She had been attractive back then, but she’d dressed plainly, wasn’t flashy. All that was gone now. Now she exuded sensuality. Her thin white blouse stretched tight across her breasts, and in that chilly, air conditioned room, there was no doubt in my mind that there was anything innocent about her anymore.