The Boyfriend of the Month Club

by Maria Geraci

  “Dr. Joe?”

  “Didn’t you get the letter? Dr. Fred retired last month and Dr. Joe took over his practice. Dr. Fred sent a letter out to all his patients explaining the whole thing.” She glanced at her computer screen. “I thought you said you hadn’t changed your address. You’re supposed to notify us if you move, you know.”

  Grace remembered receiving a letter from Sunshine Smiles, but she’d assumed it was a reminder to schedule a cleaning, so she’d tossed it unopened into her mail-to-be-dealt-with-later pile. “Um, no, no . . . I’m still at the same address. I did receive the letter, it just must have slipped my mind.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll like Dr. Joe. Our patients have been giving him extremely high marks.” She handed Grace a sheet of paper. “Dr. Joe would appreciate it if you’d fill out this patient satisfaction survey after your procedure today. Our goal is to score perfect tens.”

  Grace tucked the paper into her bag and scanned the reception area looking for a seat. There must have been a lot of emergency cases because the place was packed, although no one looked like they were in danger of bleeding to death or anything. Still, Grace had a feeling that her “emergency” was pretty far down the totem pole, which meant she was probably in for a long wait. Good thing Dr. Fred always kept the best magazines in his waiting room. But after a few minutes of searching, all Grace could find that was readable was a two-month-old copy of Southern Living. Where were all the People magazines? They’d been replaced with Newsweek, and Time, and National Geographic, and magazines on extreme sports like mountain climbing and glacial skiing. Who was interested in that? Didn’t this Dr. Joe know there were no mountains or snow in Florida?

  The National Geographics weren’t so bad, but Grace preferred learning about the exotic on the Discovery Channel. Everyone knew that magazines in a dentist’s office were supposed to be mindless fluff. Speaking of which, Dr. Fred had installed a state-of-the-art forty-eight-inch plasma-screen TV in the waiting room last year. But the only things on the walls now were photographs of sailboats, which, Grace had to admit, were pretty. But you could only stare at a photo for so long.

  Grace went up to the reception desk. “What happened to the big TV?” she asked Melanie.

  “Dr. Joe feels that we, as a society, tend to watch too much television. He wants to set a good example for his younger patients.”

  The way Melanie said Dr. Joe’s name was like he was some sort of saint. Melanie pointed out the newly remodeled children’s area of the waiting room. There was a small plastic playground and several miniature tables with coloring books and crayons. Nice for the kiddies, Grace supposed, but apparently Dr. Joe intended to bore his adult patients into comas. Maybe it was some new kind of dental pre-anesthesia.

  She found a spot near the water fountain and spent the next two hours watching the clock on the wall and thinking about what they would do to her tooth. Fixing it wouldn’t involve drilling, would it? Grace shuddered. That hadn’t occurred to her until now. She hated the sound of the drill. She should have brought a book to pass the time. But now that her book club was officially defunct, there wasn’t anything she needed to read. She was the last person left in the waiting room when they finally called her name.

  A young woman wearing royal blue scrubs who identified herself as Tiffany led her to a room in the back. She instructed Grace to sit in the padded dental chair. Grace had never seen Tiffany before. Where were all of Dr. Fred’s regular staff?

  “So you chipped your tooth, huh?” Tiffany said.

  “I know it’s not life-or-death. I guess you could say it’s more like a cosmetic dental emergency,” Grace said, waiting to get chastised by the assistant. She opened her mouth to show Tiffany.

  “Yeah, I see what you mean,” Tiffany said, studying the chipped tooth.

  “You can? So you agree, this is an emergency?”

  “Not an emergency exactly, but I’d want to get it fixed as soon as possible too,” Tiffany confided.

  Finally! Someone at Sunshine Smiles was on Grace O’Bryan’s side.

  “This isn’t going to involve drilling, is it?”

  Tiffany looked like she was used to hearing that question. “I don’t believe so, but I’ll let Dr. Joe explain the procedure. Don’t worry! He’s brilliant. He’s got a lot of interesting theories on pain management. You’re going to love him.”

  Brilliant? Grace didn’t think she’d ever heard that word linked to a dentist before. If Melanie had made Dr. Joe sound like a saint, Tiffany made him sound like Albert Einstein. Grace began to feel uneasy. Like Melanie, Tiffany was also young and attractive. Tanya, Dr. Fred’s longtime receptionist was in her late fifties. Just this past summer when Grace had come in for a cleaning she and Tanya had talked about Tanya’s eldest daughter, Ruth, who was going through a difficult divorce. Tanya had confided in Grace that she was helping out Ruth financially. Tanya was too young to retire, and jobs weren’t so easy to come by at her age. It was clear Dr. Joe liked to surround himself with pretty young things who found him “brilliant.” Had he sent Tanya packing because she didn’t fit in with the rest of his “new-and-improved” staff?

  “Tiffany, is Connie still here? She’s the hygienist who cleans my teeth. She’s been with Dr. Fred for over twenty years.”

  “Connie? Oh yeah, I remember her. She left a few days after I started working here.”

  Left? Who left a job after twenty years? Dr. Joe was no saint. He was more like the Hugh Hefner of teeth! Chipped tooth or not, Grace had her standards. She wasn’t about to give the man who’d given the axe to both Tanya and Connie her business. How could sweet, loveable Dr. Fred with his cute, grandfatherly ways and his excellent waiting room magazines have left his practice to this . . . this Dr. Joe character?

  “I’ve changed my mind. This isn’t really an emergency.” Grace sat up and swung her legs over the side of the chair. “I really hate to keep Dr. Joe in the office so late for something this trivial. So I think I’ll just—”

  “Trying to sneak out of my chair?”

  Grace froze. She’d heard that voice before.

  A man wearing maroon-colored scrubs took the folder from Tiffany’s hands. Tall, broad shoulders, slightly mussed-up hair, and the prettiest blue eyes Grace had ever seen.

  Dr. Joe was Rosie Dimples?

  He extended his hand. “I’m Joe Rosenblum. It’s nice to meet you . . .” He glanced at the top of her folder, “Ms. O’Bryan.”

  Grace had no choice but to shake his hand. “You can call me Grace,” she squeaked.

  He smiled. It was a professional smile. Fast, compact, with no real warmth behind it. Exactly like his handshake. Didn’t he recognize her? If he did, he gave no indication.

  “I hear you chipped a tooth.”

  “That’s right. It happened Saturday night,” she emphasized, hoping that would jar his memory.

  “Let’s take a look.” He sat on a stool and pushed some buttons that made the head of her chair go all the way back. He examined the tooth, running the edge of his gloved finger over it. Oddly, the motion sent a shiver down her spine. Must be her nerves. “And this chipped tooth is causing you terrible pain?” he asked.

  “Well, not exactly. But it does feel strange, you know? Like after you get your teeth cleaned and you can feel all the ridges behind your bottom teeth with your tongue?” She demonstrated to show him what she meant. “And you can’t help but do it all day long, because it feels so . . . so . . .”

  “Weird?” he supplied.

  Grace nodded.

  He smiled again. Just the teeniest bit but enough to make his dimples pop out. Dr. Joe really was awfully pretty. Then Grace remembered she’d already decided she didn’t like him.

  “We have a few options,” he began. “You can leave the tooth as is. I promise you, you’re probably the only one who’s noticed it. But . . . since the pain is so terrible you might not want to consider that.” Grace could feel her face go hot. Not only did Melanie have no sense of humor, she al
so had a big mouth. “Another option is to bond the tooth. That would require filling in the gap with some composite material. Or we could place a cap over it.”

  “I definitely want to get it fixed,” Grace said.

  “Then I say we go with the easiest solution. That would be the bonding. I have to warn you, the area we’re filling is pretty small and is susceptible to getting chipped again if you’re not careful.”

  “As long as it doesn’t involve drilling.”

  “No drilling. Got it.”

  “So could you do the bonding thing now? Or do I have to come back?”

  “We can do it now.” His gaze caught hers. “Unless you’ve changed your mind?” Grace must have looked confused because he said, “When I came in it looked like you were going for a fast escape.”

  “Oh, that. Well, I was just feeling a little . . . uneasy.”

  “It’s normal to feel uneasy at the dentist’s office.”

  “It’s just that I’m used to Dr. Fred. He’s been my dentist since I was four.”

  “Completely understandable.” He began giving Tiffany instructions, talking about which color material best matched her natural tooth shade, things like that. Grace closed her eyes and tried to relax, but an image of Dr. Joe at the Wobbly Duck kept popping into her mind. Despite the muddy clothes he’d had on that night, she’d recognized him instantly. He had to recognize her too, but by the way he was acting you’d think they were total strangers. “Once we bond the tooth you’ll have to be careful not to abuse the surface. So no more opening beer bottles with your teeth.”

  Grace’s eyes flew open. “What?”

  “That was just a little dental humor,” Dr. Joe said, deadpan.

  Dental humor, her ass. The beer analogy was no coincidence. He knew exactly who she was!

  “So how did you chip it?” he asked.

  She’d been so focused on getting the tooth fixed she’d forgotten to come up with a plausible answer for that particular question. She could always tell Dr. Joe the truth. I chipped it trying to unwrap a shrink-wrapped tampon! She’d told Marty and he’d found it hysterically funny. But Marty was a kid. Despite the fact that Dr. Joe was a health care professional, she couldn’t help but think of him as a man first, dentist second. He’d probably have the same reaction as Charlie. Too much information.

  “Um, I’m not exactly sure.”

  “You seem tense,” he said. “I’ve found that some of my patients respond well to music.” He flipped the switch on a silver panel to his right. A slow easy-listening jazz tune began to strum through the air. It was Diana Krall’s “The Look of Love.”

  Mood music? Was he serious? Grace’s spine went rigid. Dr. Joe’s “theories” on pain management didn’t involve substituting music for good old-fashioned drugs, did it?

  “You’re going to give me Novocain, right? Because I have to warn you, I have a really low pain threshold.”

  “You won’t need an anesthetic for this procedure.”

  “But—”

  “I promise, Grace. This isn’t going to hurt.”

  Something in the way he said it made her relax. “I bet you say that to all your patients,” she mumbled.

  He looked like he was about to smile. Instead, he cleared his throat and went back to conferring with Tiffany.

  Had she sounded too flirty? She certainly wasn’t trying to flirt with Dr. Joe. Grace crossed her ankles and took a deep breath. It occurred to her that the standard Florida Charlie’s uniform of khaki shorts meant she was showing a lot of leg. Rosie Dimples had seemed pretty fascinated with her legs. But Dr. Joe hadn’t even taken a peek. The girl of his dreams? Ha! Men were so full of crap. Enough of this parrying back and forth.

  “You seem really familiar, Dr. Joe. Have we met before?”

  He smiled. It was the professional smile again, the one Grace had decided she didn’t like. “I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

  She could “remind” him they’d met Saturday night at the Wobbly Duck, where he’d tried to pick her up with his cheesy lines. She’d like to see him squirm out of that one! But what if he commented about her dumping the beer in Brandon’s crotch? It had been an accident, but he probably didn’t know that.

  “Maybe I’m confusing you with someone else,” Grace finally said. The truth was she’d love nothing better than to forget Saturday night. She needed to concentrate on the matter at hand. Which was her chipped tooth and getting it fixed. “Before you start working on my tooth, do you mind if I ask how much experience you have at this kind of thing?”

  “Didn’t you get the letter?” Tiffany asked. “It contained Dr. Joe’s complete resume.” Tiffany looked up at Dr. Joe and smiled. Only an idiot wouldn’t see that she was totally besotted. Probably the real reason Dr. Joe wasn’t acknowledging his encounter with Grace was because he had something going on with Tiffany and he didn’t want her to know he’d been trying to two-time her.

  “Of course I read the letter,” Grace lied. “So sorry. Go on with whatever you were going to do.”

  Dr. Joe hesitated. “The bonding isn’t a complicated procedure, but if you prefer to get a second opinion, I understand.”

  He was giving her the perfect out. She should take it and walk out the door. None of what went down with Tanya and Connie sat well with her. On the other hand, she’d made such a fuss about this being an “emergency,” and he and his staff had stayed late to accommodate her. It would be rude to just walk out on him. If she’d bothered to open the letter, she’d have known about the transition, so most of this was really her own fault.

  She would let Dr. Joe fix her tooth today and she’d switch dentists first thing tomorrow morning. She’d find out where Tanya had gone and bring her business there.

  “I think you’ll be okay, I mean, yes, please do the bonding procedure,” Grace said.

  He placed something in her mouth to keep it open, then filled the tooth with the composite material. When he was finished he instructed Tiffany to place a light over Grace’s tooth.

  “This will help it dry,” he explained. “Just a few more minutes and we’ll be done.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Grace watched as Dr. Joe wrote in her chart. Tiffany removed the light and he pulled out the thingamajig from her mouth. He spent what seemed like a couple of minutes looking at her tooth, then handed her a mirror. “What do you think?”

  “That’s it? Aren’t I supposed to rinse and spit or something?”

  Dr. Joe almost smiled again. “Not necessary.”

  Grace studied her bottom tooth in the mirror. She looked like her old self again. Before the disastrous date with Brandon Farrell. She had to admit, Dr. Joe did fine work. “It looks good,” she said. “Now I can smile again.” To demonstrate she grinned a few times. “So, I’m all done?”

  “Just see Melanie on your way out.” He began writing in her chart again. He didn’t say anything else, so Grace assumed she’d been dismissed.

  “Okay, well, thank you. It was nice meeting you.”

  “It was nice meeting you too, Grace,” he said without looking up. Dr. Joe, the Lothario dentist, was some actor.

  She grabbed her bag and started for the door.

  “Don’t forget to fill out your patient satisfaction survey,” Tiffany said. “Everyone who turns one in gets entered in a raffle to win a forty-eight-inch plasma-screen TV.”

  So that’s where the waiting room plasma-screen TV went. What a scam! Dr. Joe wanted perfect tens on the patient satisfaction survey, huh? Well, too bad. He was going to be disappointed.

  She wrote out a check for her portion of the bill and handed it to Melanie, then waited for the receipt to print out. “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to take a minute to fill out this survey,” Grace said, scooting down to a private area of the counter.

  Grace unfolded the paper and began to read. There were eight questions and adjacent to each question was a row of bubbles marked one to ten. One was the lowest score and ten the highest.
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  1. Ease of scheduling an appointment. Melanie had certainly made her feel like an idiot when she’d called, cutting Grace off before she could finish a story. But . . . it would be unfair of Grace to give them a low mark on this one. Not when she’d gotten in the same day she’d called. Begrudgingly, she darkened in the circle next to the ten.

  2. Staff Courtesy. Aha! She began to go for the five, then stopped. Melanie hadn’t been rude to her. Not really. She just hadn’t laughed at any of Grace’s little jokes. Grace had even lied about the pain from her chipped tooth. Melanie had known about the lie, of course, but she’d still worked Grace into the schedule. And Tiffany had been more than pleasant and professional. Well, crud. She’d have to give them a ten here as well.

  3. Satisfaction with work performed. Grace sighed and marked in the circle next to the ten.

  Of course Dr. Joe and his staff were getting all tens. The survey was rigged! She skimmed through the rest of the questions until she got to the bottom.

  Please let us know if you have any further comments or suggestions.

  Boy, did she have “further” comments. Her pen began to fly over the paper.

  Dear Dr. Joe,

  I think you did a good job on my tooth. Thank you for that. And you’re right. It didn’t hurt a bit. Tiffany is a doll. Very pleasant and professional. Melanie has zero sense of humor but she seems to be doing an adequate job at the reception desk and she did work me into your schedule today, so I can’t blast her. However, I wanted you to know that after today, I will no longer be a patient at Sunshine Smiles and I think it’s important for you to know why (I have placed the reasons in bullet form for easier reading).

  ● Whose big idea was it to get rid of Tanya? (I can only assume it was yours). When I first came here as a patient (twentysix years ago!) my mother had to drag me through the door. For some reason (gee, I wonder why) I was afraid of the dentist. I sat in the waiting room and listened to the far-off noise of the drill and began to make up all sorts of crazy scenarios in my head (most of which involved some sort of torture). It was Tanya who first put me at ease. She gave me a comic book and although I couldn’t read yet, the pictures made me laugh, which helped take my mind off all those scary noises. Over the years, Tanya was always there with her bright smile, quick wit, and immense patience. Getting rid of Tanya is like getting rid of the heart and soul of Sunshine Smiles. To quote the famous Mr. Knightley, “Badly done,” Dr. Joe!