He picks out the top jaw, a little more carefully this time, holds it between thumb and forefinger. His hand shakes as he moves it into his mouth, and he spends a long time rooting around in there, shoving the partial to one side, then another, then further back. You’ve got to get it lined up just exactly parallel to the actual jaw and then push it just exactly straight on, without tilting it at all to one side or the other, so that the teeth you’ve got left can slide through the holes in the plastic gums, and the plastic gums can latch around the bases of the teeth you’ve got left. Saliva leaks over his bottom lip and drips onto the fruitcake in his shirt pocket. His hand moves furiously back and forth inside his mouth. Then he rips it out and hurls the partial across the room. It hits the raccoon in the side, knocking a cloud of dust up from his fur, and clatters to the ground. Daisy runs over and starts licking it.
“It doesn’t fit anymore,” Frank says. “It’s broken.”
I walk calmly to the umbrella can and take out my mechanical arm, but Daisy scampers away before I can get close, her tail between her legs and his teeth between hers. I stalk her across the room and finally get her cornered between the vacuum and the wall.
“Drop it,” I say.
She turns her face away, growling.
“You see this? You’ve turned this dog into a monster.”
I reach for her mouth with my pincers, squeezing the trigger so they clamp shut with a loud clack, and she drops his teeth right into one of the mounds of dirt and dust and drags herself under the coffee table, hind legs splayed. I pick the dentures up, soil and grime and dog hair all stuck to them by saliva. It hardly makes a difference. He hasn’t brushed them in weeks, just soaks them every night, when he even remembers to take them out. There’s little bits of food stuck between the molars. I dunk them in the solution and swirl them around.
“Open wide,” I say, pulling the jaw out and holding it over the glass to catch the drips. Reluctantly he opens his mouth, a wide pink maw littered with just a few teeth leaning this way and that, most of them capped in metal. “Put your chair back,” I say. He yanks the wooden lever, raising the footrest, and reclines. I set the glass on the table, next to the styrofoam cup from Burger Bonanza he’s been saving for weeks—a styrofoam cup, the sole purpose of which is to be thrown away—despite the fact that I won’t let him drink anything out of it, its rim crenellated where he’s chewed away crescents of styrofoam all the way around, and lean over him from behind, push down on his chin with one hand and reach inside his mouth with the other. It’s warm in there, and my knuckles brush the slimy insides of his cheeks, broken here and there by rough patches where he’s bit himself and the skin’s healing over.
I tap the partial onto his gums, but it gets stuck halfway, lodged tight, and I have to rock it back and forth to wrench it off. He tries to say something, but I push the dentures back down. His tongue shoves my hand, tilts it just a degree to one side so the partial grates across his teeth and won’t slide the rest of the way. He squirms under me and tries to groan something. Daisy starts howling her long, strident howl.
“Hold still,” I say. “The problem is you’re moving around too much.”
I jostle the dentures back and forth, try to scrape them down his teeth a little at a time, angling them one way, then the other. He starts bellowing like a cow, then runs out of air and starts wheezing, grabs my wrist and tries to wrench it away, but I keep it right where it is, pull the partial off and shove it on again, a little harder this time, so hard my fingers slip off and jab his pulpy, wet palate. He bites my hand. Feels like a blunt door slamming shut on my knuckles. I yank them from his mouth, and soon as my fingers are clear, he snaps his jaw shut, hard, with the sound of plastic cracking. The gears in his chair ring loudly as he throws the lever to lower the footrest. He hunches forward and coughs long, wet coughs, struggling to pull breath in between them.
“You bit me,” I say.
“I couldn’t breathe,” he wheezes.
“You’re not supposed to force it on. You probably broke it.”
“I couldn’t breathe.”
“You’ve got a nose, don’t you?” I shake my hand. Each bleeding knuckle feels like a heavy, pounding heart. Blood washes down my fingers.
“Keep your hands out of my mouth from now on,” he says. His eyes are watering.
“Smile,” I say.
He pulls his lips wide, so wide he looks ghoulish, but all his teeth are in place. The top ones, at least. He starts coughing again.
“Run up to the store and get me a fruitcake,” he wheezes, waving me toward the door, as if that’s going to clear his airway.
I snatch the half-eaten block from his shirt pocket and drop it in his lap.
On the TV, the weatherman says we might get some warmer weather this time next week, the first faint currents of spring. They’re always saying something like that, finding some glimmer in the distant future to keep us all going a little longer. By the time it gets here, the forecast’s changed.
In other news, a lady reporter’s pleasant voice informs us, an elderly woman in town was raped and beaten half to death in her own home at three o’clock this afternoon. The man who did it followed her from the grocery store, then lounged around in her living room when he was done and ordered a pizza while she bled out on the bedroom carpet and quietly dragged herself across it to get to the phone. Had to wait for him to stop naming all the toppings he wanted before she could call the police, and they didn’t get there much sooner than the pizza boy.
“You ought to be glad of it,” I say. “Your mama. You ought to be glad she died. If she’d lived, if any one of them had lived, any one at all, you’d have ended up married to some nice girl. Just to make them happy. You know that?”
I pinch the knuckle of my index finger shut. The skin’s loose, bunches together and turns red, and when I let it go it’s slow to flatten, slow to remember its shape. The seam of blood barely holds it together. I daub it on my britches, careful not to tear the clots, gather the trash from his lap, and stand over him with my mechanical arm while he peels the wrapper back from the fruitcake, slow and exhausted, slumped in his chair. As soon as it’s loose, I snatch it from his hand with my pincers.
“If you don’t start putting these in the trash can where they belong,” I say, waving it in his face, “I’m going to stop buying you fruitcake.” He forgets that it’s all stocked in the trunk.
“Yessum,” he says.
I pinch his leg with the mechanical arm. He sits statue-still, the fruitcake in his lap, statue-still except for his jaw and his hands on the armrests, always working, always clenching and letting go. The old woman on the television sobs.
You can spend a whole life trying to withdraw from this world, sealing yourself off from it as tight as possible, and still it does its best to sneak in. Still it follows you home.
“Pancakes?” Frank says.
Daisy shoves her head between his knees.
SEVENTEEN
We both worked just as long as we could. I kept the shop open for years after everybody else had switched to prefab styrofoam forms you shaved down to the size you wanted and started sending the skins off to somebody else to tan, after the trash started creeping closer in strip clubs and pawn shops and tattoo parlors that only the train tracks restrained from spilling onto my side of the street and I had to put bars over the windows and the doors to keep the hoodlums from breaking in and stealing my chemicals, even after the bureaucrats of the Fish and Wildlife Service started stopping by with their tomes of forms to fill out for each carcass to ensure I wasn’t mounting any endangered animals.
“If it’s lying dead in my shop,” I told their agent, when he paid me a visit to discuss my lack of thorough documentation, “I believe it’s past the point of being endangered.”
And Frank, when his knees buckled one day as the spool dropped into his arms and drove him to the ground as if in supplication, as if in prayer, took the reassignment to dye-vat operator they offered him
, pulled the lever to lower the ropes of denim into the vats and pulled the lever to raise the ropes dripping back out, over and over until they reached the commanded shade. By then, they were really trying to make things cheap, weren’t even using real indigo anymore but some synthetic sulfur compound, came home on him every day smelling like rotten eggs. Soon after that, they got rid of the entire loading-dock crew, had one man do with a forklift what they used to pay twenty to do by hand. We were just a little over fifty years old.
We left the house together one time—one single time—in all those years. One hot Sunday at the end of summer, I was drying the dishes after breakfast with a succession of dish towels, each one growing wetter and wetter until it was good for nothing but pushing water around on a pan, when he trudged in, sat down, and started brushing black polish out of a tin and into a thin, dull film across the toes of his dress shoes. He was wearing a clean white shirt and khaki trousers and had his hair combed slick back, looked like he’d dolled himself up for an important date. I stopped drying and watched him.
“I thought I’d go with you,” he said, buffing the toe of his shoe with a strip of muslin. He didn’t look up. “To the store.”
“Really?” I said.
“I don’t want to stay cooped up all day. It’s nice out.” Something about him, about the frantic, mechanical speed with which he drew the strip of fabric back and forth across the leather until the sun splashed bright across it, in the tight set of his shoulders, seemed restless and wild, like he was that night he showed up breathless and prowling in my shop, but he sounded real casual, as if all of this was absolutely normal. With a shoehorn, he tugged the stiff back of his shoe out and shoved his foot inside, yanked the laces so hard and tight I doubted he would ever be able to get the thing off.
I tried my best to adopt the same casual tone, so as not to break it. “What about the yard?”
“I reckon it’ll still be here when we get back.” He stood, brushing dust from the front of his trousers. “You divide up the grocery list,” he said. “I’ll follow you over there in the truck.”
We each had our own cart, and we pretended not to know each other, that we just happened to be meandering at roughly the same pace down the aisles. The tile was a dingy orange linoleum, and there was a dark red stripe halfway up the white cinderblock wall, painted all the way around the store, bending in every corner. There was hardly anybody else there, and the creak of Frank’s soles was loud and grating. He’d never had much occasion to break them in.
“Excuse me,” he said, as I was picking through a crate of peaches. “Can you tell me which of these is ripe?” He nodded to a heap of cantaloupe. He liked them almost rotten, the rind so thin you could practically peel it away from the warm, wet meat. Anything else he said didn’t have enough taste. I picked one from the top of the pile, scattering gnats, and he watched closely as I pressed it to my ear, its skin rough against my cheek, and rapped it with my knuckles, listening for the telltale resonance of the hollow. I started to put it in my cart before I remembered to hand it back to him.
“Thank you,” he said.
I nodded and went on my way, but he pushed his cart so slowly, gaping in dilemma and wonder at every endcap and sale, nervously rolling up and unrolling his list, that I had to wait for him to catch up, and pretend for a long time to read the ingredients on a jar of pickles while he agonized over which green beans to get. A young woman in a bright sleeveless dress and green eyeshadow, with hair that the night before, at least, had been swaddled shiny and high into a beehive, wandered into the aisle, her plastic basket dangling from one elbow and knocking against her bony hip. She smiled at him. Her lips were thin, her teeth large, and seeing him there, out in the open and so close to her, close enough that his elbow nearly brushed her waist as he finally made up his mind and reached for a can, stirred something in me. I couldn’t stop staring at him, watching his fingers close around a smooth glass jar, his pressed collar dig into his thick neck, the skin above it flushed, the vein swollen.
“Excuse me,” he said, shuffling a step closer. She was right there, she heard him talking to me. The breath in my chest drew dense around my heart, holding it still. It strained to beat. “Have you tried this crunchy peanut butter?”
“I don’t believe I’d like the texture of it myself,” I said. “I’d rather not bite down on something hard in my peanut butter. Makes me feel like I’m eating rocks.”
“Thank you,” he said, and shambled off. The girl wandered toward the cash registers. I wished she’d come back, tried to think of something I could say to make her stay, but she turned the corner. The aisle was full of heavy, Sunday morning quiet.
“Excuse me,” Frank said, just a minute later, ten feet down the very same aisle. “Are strawberry conserves the same thing as strawberry preserves?”
“There’s no one else here,” I said, laughing softly, and I brushed my knuckles against the knob of his wrist, exposed beyond the buttoned cuff of his shirt. He pulled it away and picked up another jar, ostentatiously lowering his brows in studious examination.
“And how do they differ from jam?” he said.
I pushed my cart to the meat case, left him there frowning at all the jams and preserves and conserves, and a minute later, when he pulled his cart beside mine and started scrutinizing some chicken breasts, he’d piled a jar of each one right on top of a loaf of bread. I tugged it out so it wouldn’t get smashed even more, and the jars clinked loudly as they tumbled into the bottom of the cart. He bristled and looked anxiously all around.
“Relax.” I picked up a pound of ground beef. Its blood had spilled over the edge of its styrofoam tray and gathered in the creases of the plastic wrap underneath. It was real thin and watery, barely like blood at all. “If anything’s going to arouse suspicion, it’s you acting like bombs are going off. Nobody here cares what we do. They don’t even know us.”
“Speak for yourself.” He poked his thumb into several different spots on a chicken breast and watched the dimples rise and flatten again, as if that would reveal something about its freshness. “And speak quieter. My family were respected members of this community.”
“Then go be respected in the cookie aisle and get me a box of vanilla wafers.”
He glanced at the scrap of paper in his hand. He’d rolled and unrolled it between his fingers so much it was soft and wrinkled, the words rubbed away.
“That’s not on my list,” he said.
“I’m spending so much time answering your questions I haven’t even looked at my list. So do me a favor and go get the vanilla wafers.”
He opened his mouth to say something. I pushed my cart toward the fish counter. The man behind it was too busy to notice us, entirely preoccupied with assiduously piling different combinations of salmon onto a scale to make sure the customer, a middle-aged woman with orthopedic shoes that dug into her fleshy ankles, didn’t get a single ounce more than she wanted, but Frank stared at him a minute, looking sick, before he dropped the chicken breasts on top of the bread and hurried off. A wheel on his cart caught as he turned the corner, dragged screeching across the floor.
I found him in the freezer aisle fifteen minutes later. His cart was out in the middle of the floor with not one single thing more in it, and he’d slid open the glass door of the ice cream case and was hunched over it, clutching either side of the opening with his face and chest hung down close, letting the cold air buffet his cheeks. His vertebrae pressed visibly against the underside of his shirt, just beneath the collar.
I parked my cart behind him and looked over his shoulder at the ever-growing variety of available ice creams. He didn’t turn. The freezer shuddered and hummed.
“This was a bad idea,” he said, each word a cloud that bloomed and vanished.
“It wasn’t mine.”
He nodded. The cold air billowed out in an endless, dissipating fog. I reached past him to tug out a bucket of Neapolitan ice cream.
“Preserves has chunks in it,” I
said. “Jam is smooth.”
“What about conserves?”
“Conserves are smooth but thicker. They dry the fruit out first.”
He nodded, pushed himself upright with what seemed an exhaustive effort, and put the jars of conserves and preserves in the freezer case.
“What’re you doing?” I said. “Put those back where they belong.”
He stared straight ahead for a moment, as if through the shelves of paper towels and cleaning solution and sacks of flour, all the way back to the empty spot where the jars had been. He took a deep breath and shut the freezer door. His fingers cut lines of clarity into the frost.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“You haven’t got half the things on your list.”
He gripped the handle of his cart tightly and let his head hang down between his shoulders. “Please,” he whispered. “Please, just be quiet.”
He pushed his cart toward the registers. I waited a while before I followed, watching the cold cloud the glass once more. We paid for our groceries, and loaded our bags into our cars on opposite sides of the parking lot, and didn’t look at each other again for a long, long time, even when we got home, and didn’t leave the house together, or arrive together at the same destination, for another twenty years, until the day that tiny plaque in one of the arteries inside his heart finally ruptured, and the blood, clotting round to close it over, sealed the vessel so tightly not even the blood itself could break through.
EIGHTEEN
I push my way up from the table and put my bowl in the sink: and there’s Frank, out in front of his shed with the lawnmower, there’s the red gas can in his hand and grease stains already all across the front of his pants. He tilts the gas can, but nothing comes out. He holds it there for a second, turned completely upside down, before he rights it to unstop the dingy yellow spout. He lost the plug years ago, just keeps a paper towel twisted up and jammed in there. He tugs it out, soaked and dripping, and tosses it to the ground.
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