The receptionist at the dental office in Dayton had asked a plain question, and I carried it with me for six days before I could answer it. I am Margie Teller, seventy one years old, and I sat down on the vinyl couch of that waiting room at ten minutes before nine on a Tuesday morning, in my good gray coat, with my purse in my lap and my heart going like a drum. My husband Gordon had passed in March. The appointment of the other patient, the one booked right after his, was for nine o clock, under a name I did not know.
She came in at five minutes past, a slim young woman of about twenty three, in scrubs from a nursing home, with a cheap canvas bag on her shoulder and the careful smile of someone who has learned to be polite to strangers. She stopped when she saw me. I do not know what she saw, an old woman in a gray coat who looked as if she had come to settle a score. She came over anyway, and sat down on the edge of the couch beside me. “Mrs. Teller,” she said softly. “You look just like he said.” I could not speak.
The receptionist, a kind woman named Dolores, found a reason to go into the back. I turned on the couch and looked the girl full in the face, and everything I had imagined for six days, all the ugly stories I had told myself in the night, fell away like a coat. She had the ears of Gordon. She had his way of folding her hands. “Who are you?” I asked, and she said, “My name is Tessa Marlow. Your husband was my driver.” And she began to cry, quietly, the way young people cry when they have been brave for a long time.
A dental appointment kept after his passing gave one widow the morning to bring a young woman into the family in Dayton.
I gave my terms right there on the couch, with my hand over hers. “Tessa, I am going to ask you to tell me all of it, from the beginning, and I am going to promise you that nothing you say will make me love my husband less. When you have told me, we are going to walk in to that appointment together. Whatever Gordon was paying for, I will go on paying for. And after that I would like to take you to breakfast, if you will let a stranger. I think he would have wanted it, and I know I do.”
She told me in pieces. Nine years earlier, Gordon had volunteered as a driver for a program that took foster children to their appointments, because he had grown up poor, with a mouth full of bad teeth that he had hidden behind his hand for fifty years. He had driven a frightened fourteen year old girl to a clinic where no one else would take her. Her mother, who had worked on the line at his plant, had passed that spring. He had promised, over a cup of bad coffee, that Tessa would never go without. “He was ashamed of how it looked,” she said. “He said you would think it was something it was not.”
Neither of us noticed the man in the doorway until the bell over the door rang. He was big and unshaven, in a canvas jacket, the stepfather of Tessa, Rick Dunning, who had followed her from her apartment because he had learned that the card of Gordon paid for something, and he wanted whatever was left. He crossed the room in three strides, tore the canvas bag from her shoulder, and ran for the door with it clutched to his chest. The bag held her wallet, her bus pass and the card. He did not make the door. Dolores had come out of the back with a clipboard in each hand, and behind her came two hygienists in lavender scrubs and an elderly patient named Mr. Okafor with his walker. They simply stood across the entrance in a row, as if it were choir rehearsal. Rick stopped so fast that he nearly fell. Mr. Okafor lifted his walker an inch off the floor and set it down again with a clang.
Rick Dunning looked at the walker, at the hygienists, at Dolores, and he dropped the bag on the carpet. The police took his name for a report, and the girl at the desk carried the bag back to Tessa without a word. Tessa sat down beside me, shaking, and I put my arm around her narrow shoulders and held on. Neither of us said anything for a long while. Then she whispered, “He used to say that you were the best thing that ever happened to him, and that I would love you.” I told her that I already did, and I found that it was true.
The money consequences were gentle. Gordon had left an estate of one million, one hundred thousand dollars, which I had been afraid to count. I paid the dental office the balance for Tessa and every year to come, and I put her name beside mine on a small trust for her nursing school, so that no stepfather could ever touch it. The police advised Rick Dunning to leave the county, and he did. Tessa finished her nursing degree in the spring, and the whole waiting room of the dentist stood and applauded when she walked in wearing her cap.
In the name of Gordon, who passed in March, I started the Gordon Teller Fund. It pays for dental care for foster youth and for older adults who hide their smiles, in Montgomery, Greene and Warren counties. In the first year we paid for cleanings, braces and dentures for sixty four people. One was a retired bus driver from Xenia who had not smiled in a photograph since 1974. He sat in the chair, looked in the mirror, and asked the hygienist whether he could keep the mirror. She gave it to him.
Tessa and I still keep the back to back appointments, twice a year, his and hers, only now they are mine and hers. We sit in the waiting room on the vinyl couch and read the same worn magazines. Last month, when the hygienist called her name, she squeezed my hand and said, “Mama Margie, I will see you on the other side.” I sat there smiling at the fish tank like an old fool. Gordon would have loved every minute of it, and I told him so, out loud, when I got home.