“There’s something else,” she says as I gather my troop and we start to leave. “Something else I just remembered,” she says, tapping her temple with the point of an index finger. “The sun was so damn bright I couldn’t see much of the car. Had to look down, you know, at the street, so that the sun wouldn’t blind me. But there’s something I remember about that car. It was one of them cars with the gold cross on the front.”
“A gold cross?” I ask, and she says, “Yeah. A gold cross. Like the logo or whatever you call it. The emblem. A gold cross,” and I beckon for my smartphone from Maisie’s hand and type in those exact words, car with a gold cross logo, and instantly it appears on my screen, dozens of images bearing just that: Chevrolet’s famous emblem, a golden bow tie. “Like this?” I ask, thrusting my phone to the window so that she can see.
She smiles, revealing a row of bent teeth, yellowing quickly from the nicotine and tar. “That’s the one,” she says.
A black Chevrolet. That’s what I’m looking for.
“Thank you again for your time, ma’am,” I tell the woman, tacking on, “I didn’t get your name,” and at this she says that it’s Betty. Betty Maurer.
“Thank you for your time, Betty,” I say, and this time we leave.
NICK
BEFORE
June arrives, bringing with it all the heat and humidity of a typical summer in Chicagoland. Overnight, the mercury on the thermometer soars to eighty-some degrees in a climate known for having two seasons: hot and cold. I make the difficult decision to switch on the air conditioners in our home and the practice, though my mind calculates the sum of the rising cost of the electricity bills already, anxious long before they come. With the arrival of June, a lease payment was due, an imposing number that boggles my mind. I didn’t have it to spare, though I was able to maneuver an extension of fifteen days. It buys me time. I’m hoping that by the fifteenth of June I have enough saved up.
But I’m not just thinking about this lease payment; I’m considering the bigger picture. I’m thinking of ways to save on rent and other expenses. Without Connor my patient load is again nearing full, though I’m waiting on pins and needles for some sort of discriminatory discharge lawsuit to arrive from a disgruntled Dr. C, as I’m sure it will. I’ve tried calling him to talk it out. Many times. He won’t return my calls.
The good news is that I’ve been doing well on the offtrack betting, though it’s a slow accumulation, thanks to daily limits imposed on the online gambling site, a gradual buildup of money that I hope amounts to something before a complaint arrives from Melinda Grey. I’ve advanced from merely horse racing to placing bets on the NBA playoff games. I’m not much of a basketball whiz, but have inundated myself with rankings and statistical analysis, point spreads, to place my money on the teams with the best odds. The Warriors are a heavy favorite, and so I put my money on the Warriors and watch as they take the first game of the series in overtime. Clara sits beside me on the sofa as I press down hard on her sciatic nerve with the pad of a thumb, Maisie on the floor before us, scribbling in a coloring book. “I never knew you were such a basketball fan,” she says, and I think to myself how suddenly there are many things she doesn’t know.
“You have a new patient today,” says Stacy the next day as I step from the humid morning air into the serenity of the air-conditioned office. There is music on, some sort of ambient music that overrides the show on the wall-mount TV screen; the room smells of coffee, reminding me of the things I cannot have. Caffeine. A Weber grill.
Stacy smiles. A new patient is, of course, like gold dust around here. I shed my car keys and sunglasses, and she wishes me good luck. I return the smile. There was a time I didn’t need luck, but now I do.
Coming into the open-concept office space, my hygienist does what she always does and introduces me to the patient, telling me something I don’t already know about the patient’s personal life, something other than what is happening with his or her teeth. It’s rapport-building, a means of showing our patients we care. Not just about their teeth, but about them. Them as people. As human beings. And so my hygienist Jan says, “Good morning, Dr. Solberg. We have Katherine here. Katherine Cobb, who’s just relocated to the Midwest from the Pacific Northwest,” and as I drop down into my stool and extend my hand in greeting, I have the surprise of my life when, sitting there on the dental chair is not Katherine Cobb, but Kat Ables—the woman who, twelve years ago, I was absolutely certain I would spend the rest of my life with.
“Kat,” I say. My mouth gapes open; I don’t have the wherewithal to make it stop. She looks unchanged to me, still eighteen years old and gorgeous. We didn’t break up. I went to college. We said we’d keep in touch, and then, somehow or other, we didn’t keep in touch. “Kat Ables,” I say, though I know she’s no longer Kat Ables. Worse so, I gather that she’s married Steve Cobb who I also went to high school with, this larger-than-life presence that I hoped I’d never hear of again. He was a wrestler at the time, an imposing figure who walked the halls with a whole underclass entourage surrounding him. He always had a thing for Kat.
“Long time, no see,” she says, and she smiles this extraordinarily white smile, and I know the last thing I’m going to be able to focus on right now is her teeth. “How are you doing, Nick?” she asks, and I send Jan on an errand so that for a few moments Kat and I can be alone. Jan takes her time; she doesn’t hurry back, though the supply closet is right across the hallway, and all I asked for were more cotton pellets. Even Jan knows I don’t need any cotton pellets.
“Well,” I stammer. “I’m doing well,” though I step on the wrong foot pedal and force her head down when I meant to lift her upright. Kat laughs. She has the most melodic laugh, airy and carefree. Clara, thwarted by her mother’s dementia and eight months of a wearisome pregnancy, rarely laughs anymore. But Kat still laughs, and the ease of it, the simplicity, makes me laugh, too.
“What a coincidence this is,” I say, knowing it’s not at all a coincidence.
“My family and I just moved into the area,” she tells me, “and I knew you were here. I guess you can say I’ve been cyberstalking you,” and I blush because, instead of feeling any sort of ominous dread over the fact, I let it go to my head. I find that I like that suggestion, of Kat searching for me online.
“Cyberstalking?” I ask, and she tells me abashedly how she Googled my name and, as luck would have it, stumbled upon my practice’s website. She was due for an exam anyway, and needed to find a new dentist. She leans forward in her chair, and, like that, our professional gap transforms into something more familiar and intimate. Her fingers twiddle with the edges of the paper napkin that lies across her chest, though the Kat I knew was never fidgety, never nervous. She’s changed, as have I. Twelve years ago she said she’d put her world on hold for me. She’d wait. But she didn’t wait.