Deep Down True (10 page)

After Dana dropped Grady off, fleece jacket zipped up to his chin, she returned to the house to get the list for the party store.
I have to get this car cleaned out today,
she told herself. Cheez-It crumbs were sprinkled across the floor mats like orange sawdust. She ran into the house, leaving the car door open. Then the phone rang several times, and she found herself answering e-mails and throwing in a load of laundry before she managed to return to the car.

As she backed down the driveway, something brushed against her ankle. Instinctively she pulled her feet up. When the car began to move quickly down the incline of the driveway, she stomped on the brake and jerked to a stop.
I’m losing my mind,
she thought. She drove to Party On!, and as she pulled in to the parking lot, she felt it again, that sense that something was crawling around the floor of her car.

Then there was a blur of motion, and the thing jumped onto her lap. A chipmunk. With an oddly orange tinge to its face.

“AAHHH!” Dana screamed, swerving by a streetlight pole at the edge of the parking lot. She stomped on the brake again, her body heaved forward, and her upper lip banged into the steering wheel. She wrenched the car into park, opened the door, and leaped out onto the asphalt, screaming, hands swiping at her thighs as if the creature were still attached to her lap. With adrenaline humming through her veins, it was a few seconds before her nervous system registered that she was no longer in danger of imminent destruction.

She heard laughter and looked up. Two small children were hopping around slapping at their thighs and laughing as if they’d never seen anything so funny. “Ahhhh!” one yelled, waving his little hands in the air.

Beside them stood a woman holding a dozen helium balloons. “Okay, everyone into the car now,” she barked, and slid back the minivan door.

“Ahhhhh!” yelled the kids, falling into each other in hysterics.

“I said NOW!” She hustled them into the minivan, and squealed out of the parking lot.

Those kids are definitely not buckled in,
thought Dana. Then it occurred to her that
she’d
been the reason for the woman’s swift departure.
Dear God,
she realized with horror,
she must have thought I was some sort of druggie.

After a few moments of standing there wondering what on earth to do next, Dana cautiously opened all the car doors. She reached in and pressed the horn. A moment later the vicious, possibly rabid chipmunk skittered out toward some bushes by the side of the lot. Dana quickly closed the doors and locked the car.

She tried to act normal as she strode through Party On! looking for happy-face paper goods while her knees quivered and her upper lip throbbed from its collision with the steering wheel. When she got to the cash register, she tried to smile pleasantly but ended up grimacing in pain.

“Dude, you know you’re bleeding, right?” said the clerk, his beard growing in patches around his acne.

Dana put her fingers to her upper lip, which felt oddly swollen. Her fingers were bloody when she looked at them. “Oh,” she breathed. “I banged my mouth.”

“Is that why you were going psycho out in the lot?”

“You saw that?”

“Yeah, we all heard it and went over to the window.” He bobbed his head and chuckled at the memory. “But what was the deal with honking the horn?” he asked. “That was, like,
sick
.”

Dana shook her head. “Please,” she implored him, “ just ring it up.”

D
ANA WAS ABLE TO CONTROL HER EMOTIONS until she was back in the car, and then humiliation settled on her like crows on roadkill. The tears came when she tried to switch lanes. That’s when she saw that the passenger-side mirror was hanging from a thin red wire exposed like an artery. Apparently she hadn’t entirely missed that light pole. The mirror banged against the door panel when she made turns. Every clank made her cry harder.

When she got home, she yanked the swinging mirror from the door panel.
What do you do with an amputated auto part?
she wondered, eventually stuffing it at the back of the coat closet. She went to the bathroom and carefully rolled her lip up with her thumbs. There was a small gash on the inside, and her front tooth had been chipped—a triangular piece was missing.

Good Lord,
she thought,
I look like a
Hee Haw
character,
and she started to cry again.

Finally she was steady enough to form a plan. Morgan’s party was the following night, and she couldn’t offer the guests chips and cheesy dip through broken teeth. Much as she hated to face Dr. Sakimoto again, she dialed the number. She would tell him she was working on the purging issue. That’s all she would need to say, that she was working on it.

No one picked up the phone, nor did an answering machine come on. Sucking on a Popsicle to ice her lip, Dana called again, with the same results.
Well, this is ridiculous,
she thought. Someone had to be there. She decided they must be having phone problems and got in her car, checking first for rodents lurking under the seats.

When she pushed on the heavy glass door and entered the office, there was no one behind the reception desk, but there were people in the waiting room. The phone seemed ready to ring out of its cradle. “Where is everyone?” she asked an elderly gentleman.

“The place is practically abandoned!” he yelled, as if the ringing phone were a foghorn. “Ahh, I’ve had about enough of this.” He struggled out of his seat and left.

The only remaining occupants were a young mother and a preschooler sitting on her lap. The little girl looked unhappy, and the mother was whispering in her ear. “But I don’t want to,” insisted the girl loudly. The mother whispered again. The girl answered, “I don’t care if they all fall out. I’ll just eat mashed potatoes forever!” And she began to cry.

The mother sighed. “I know it’s only ten o’clock,” she said to Dana as she rose to leave, jostling the girl onto her hip, “but it’s already been a
really
long day.”

For you and me both,
thought Dana, now alone in the waiting room. The phone began to ring again. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she muttered, and went to the receptionist desk. Reaching over the high counter for the phone, she picked up the receiver. “Hello, Cotters Rock Dental Center.”

“Yeah, I got this bill here, and it can’t be right. I’m saying to my wife, this just can’t be right. And I’m just going to call this dentist guy up and check it out, because you never know if someone typed the wrong number, or something of that nature . . .”

He seemed to have a lot on his mind, and Dana let him go on for a while, her tongue flicking across the broken tooth. Finally she said, “It sounds like you have a question about your bill.”

“Yes!” he said. “I do!”

“I’m just helping out at the moment, so why don’t you give me your name and number and I’ll have a member of the staff get back to you in a timely manner. Would that be all right?”

That was just fine with him, and he thanked her several times. He was satisfied. Dana remembered what that was like—listening carefully to a problem and providing an answer that was satisfactory. She remembered what it was like to have people say thank you.

As soon as she leaned back over the counter to put the phone down, it rang again. She opened the door to the left of the counter that led back to the operatories and Dr. Sakimoto’s office and heard the high-pitched whine of a drill. “Hello?” she called tentatively.

“Be right with you!” called Dr. Sakimoto. His voice sounded harried.

Poor guy,
she thought. Where was his staff? She went around to the reception desk to see if she could put the answering machine on, but it was a more complicated system than the one at her old job. Dana sank into the vinyl swivel chair. She’d had a chair like this. Back when people appreciated her. By the time she’d answered four or five calls, taken messages in her careful handwriting, and tidied up the desk area, a patient emerged from the office behind her. “Oh,” he said, the right side of his mouth drooping like an unwatered plant. “You came in.”

“I’m just helping out,” she told him. “A staff member will call to schedule your next appointment.” He smiled at her with the un-anesthetized half of his face and went out through the heavy glass door. Dana turned to find Dr. Sakimoto leaning in the doorway.

“So,” he said, motioning to her with his chin, his voice warm with humor. “I’ve known you for years, and I had
no idea
you were my fairy godmother. How’d I miss that?”

Dana grinned up at him. “Oh, I just can’t stand the sound of a ringing phone. Why didn’t you put the answering machine on?”

“I don’t know
how,
if you can believe it! My receptionist, Kendra, went home with a stomach bug this morning, and Marie has the day off. I didn’t want to bother them.” He caught sight of the cracked tooth. “How the heck did you do that?”

She sighed. “It’s so embarrassing, I can’t even say it. Besides, you have all these people to call back.” She handed him the list of messages.

“I’ll call tonight, after hours.” He glanced at the waiting room. “And it appears you’re my only customer at the moment.” She followed him into one of the operatories and sat in the exam chair. “Come on,” he goaded her. “I could use a good story. How’d you do it?”

“You’re going to think I’m some sort of . . .”

“What? Some sort of normal human being? Everyone slips on a banana peel now and then.” Still she hesitated. “Okay,” he said, and seemed to be letting her off the hook. He leaned his head from side to side, stretching his neck muscles. It reminded Dana of a boxer entering a ring. “You know,” he said, “it’s not like you’d shock me. I have plenty of embarrassing stories, too.”

She sighed. “Bet you can’t beat
this
one.”

“Bet I can. I’ve got a ripsnorter. Want to hear it?”

“Yes!” She was desperate, she realized, to be reminded that she wasn’t the only person who’d ever made a raving idiot of herself in public.

“All right. This one time . . .” He glanced at her and grinned. “I’d gotten up the nerve to ask out this woman I liked. And to my surprise she said yes, so I wanted to take her somewhere really nice. I picked this upscale restaurant—the PolytechnicON20—you know it?”

“Oh, yes, Kenneth and I went there once. Beautiful. And the food was fantastic.”

“Right. Well, I put on my best suit and drove over to her house. It was winter, very cold, so I wanted to be considerate and leave the car running with the heat on. I get out of the car, and just as the door closes—you know, when you hear the latch go
ca-chunk
?—I see the button on the door is down.” He shook his head. “I locked myself out with the car running.”

“That’s terrible,” said Dana, secretly disappointed. It was embarrassing, but nowhere near as bad as her own story.

“That’s nothing,” he said, his hand batting the air. She hadn’t noticed this before, that he talked with his hands. Until now most of their conversations had occurred with his fingers in her mouth. “So I’m thinking I’ll call one of my daughters to bring me a spare set of keys,” he went on. “Maybe she could get there before this woman even noticed. I go to reach into my suit pocket for my cell phone, and that’s when I realize I’ve caught the side of the jacket in the car door. So I start pulling and tugging”—he pantomimed this for her—“and I wrench so hard that I split the seam of my best suit jacket, right up to the armpit!”

Dana started to laugh. “Oh, no!”

“And why won’t the jacket come out?” Dr. Sakimoto continued, his hands going up as if to implore the gods. “Because the cell phone is stuck in the pocket on the other side of the door! But wait, it gets even better . . .

“So she comes out, and by this time I’ve wiggled out of the jacket, and I’m standing there in the freezing cold with my silk tie flapping in the breeze. And I try to be all nonchalant about it, like this happens all the time and if she could just get me a coat hanger, I could pop the button out. No worries, we’ll still make our reservation.

“Well, the
one thing
that went right is the button popped up quickly. But there was still the problem of the jacket. I had nothing but my shirt and tie, which looked silly in the winter and seemed too casual. There wasn’t time to go home and get another, so she insists—
insists
, mind you—that I wear one of her dead husband’s jackets.”

“Her husband was dead?”

“Yes, he’d been dead for three years, and she still had all his clothes.” He gave her a glance that said,
We both know what that means. . . .
“So I wear this horrible old jacket, which is too long and too narrow and clearly hadn’t been dry-cleaned since it was last worn. I looked like a little boy dressing up in his daddy’s suit, with the arms flapping this way and that. A total nightmare.

“And to make matters
worse
, she has herself a little trip down memory lane with the jacket! Goes on and on about all the times he wore it, and where they went, and how much fun they had. One glass of wine was not enough, not for this evening, no way. So I order another, and the waiter sets it down before me, and I go to reach for it . . . but the sleeve is too long, and I forget to push it up as I’d been doing all evening like a five-year-old, and I knock the glass over!” His hands began to wind in circles toward his chest. “I see it coming toward me like it’s in slow motion, and I know in another nanosecond I’m about to be doused with red wine. And all I can think is, ‘No, this can’t be happening. It’s not believable.’ Can you believe it, even now?”

“No!” Dana breathed. “And you did it to yourself!”

“Yes!” he said, pointing at her. “Thank you—that’s the most important part. If the waiter had done it, that’d be bad, but it wouldn’t have been my fault. This
was
my fault. It was
all me
!”

“She got upset, didn’t she?” asked Dana.