Chapter 9
Iwas at the front desk on Tuesday morning when Brielle got her smile.
I'd made sure of it, traded a Thursday for the Tuesday with Donna, and I sat at the desk I built ten years ago and filed insurance forms with steady hands while down the hall, in operatory three, under a TV playing a show about a couple buying a lake house they could not afford, my husband's mistress reclined in the chair and opened her mouth and let a hygienist named Aubrey paint her teeth with the verdict.
I didn't watch. That's important. I wanted to, the animal part of me wanted to stand in the doorway and witness, but witnessing is what gets you caught, so I filed forms and I listened.
And the practice went on around me, the foam machine hissing, Bitey patrolling his tank, the phone ringing, “Jacobs Family Dentistry, Cedar Hollow's Brightest Smiles, how can I help you," in my own soft voice.
Twenty minutes later Brielle came down the hall running her tongue over her teeth the way you do, checking, and she stopped at the desk and gave me the whole-face smile, brand new, and said, "Oh my gosh, Kelly, you have to do it, it's incredible, look," and she leaned in, and there they were, her teeth, gleaming, white, primed, opened, dyed, the green still hours and hours from rising.
Invisible, sealed in, waiting.
I looked at my husband's mistress smiling her doomed smile six inches from my face and I said, with total sincerity, "Wow. That's really something, Brielle. That's going to photograph beautifully."
"Right? Dr. Jacobs says I'm the billboard." She laughed, delighted, running her tongue over the smooth new front of her life. "He wants me front and center. He said, and I quote, 'You're the face of this practice now.'"
The face of this practice now.
She didn't even mean it as a knife. That's what I keep coming back to. She wasn't trying to wound me.
In her head I was the boss's wife who did filing and brought muffins, a soft harmless cardigan of a woman, and she was the face of the practice.
Front and center, the future, and she had no reason to hide it from me because she had no idea I knew, and so she just stood at the desk I'd built and told me, glowing, that my husband had given her my whole life.
Then she asked if I wanted to make some desserts for the gala.
I said I'd think about the dessert table. I filed my forms. At the end of my shift I drove home and made dinner.
That night Dana called while I had my hands in the sink, and I put her on speaker and dried a tumbler I didn't need to dry just to have something for my hands to do.
"You're too quiet," she said. "You go quiet right before you do something, you've done it since you were nine. Talk to me."
"There's nothing to talk about. It's a clock now. Everything's loaded. I just have to not flinch for four days."
"That's the part I'd be bad at," Dana said. "The not flinching. I'd flinch. I flinch at the dentist, ironically.” She hesitated. “You okay sleeping in that house? With him?”
I looked through the window over the sink at the porch lights Spencer had installed himself, voice-activated, very proud, glowing on their timer over the yard.
"I sleep great," I said, and it was true, and it was the most unsettling true thing about the whole period, that I'd never slept better in my life than I slept those last four nights beside a man whose practice I'd already lit a slow fuse under.
"It's like a hotel now. I'm a guest who knows the checkout date. You sleep fine in a hotel."
Dana was quiet a second. Then she said, "When this is done, I'm buying you a real dinner.
Not a country-club dinner with no prices on the menu.
A dinner with prices, where you can see exactly what the thing costs, and I pay it, and we know what we paid.
" Which is, if you knew Dana, an entire love letter, and I told her so, and she told me to shut up and go to bed, and I did. I slept great.
The next day at the office was the worst of the four, because it was the day the thing I'd done started to show on someone else's face before it was supposed to.
Brielle came to the front desk twice in one morning to check her teeth in the little mirror by the appointment book, casual, fixing nothing, just looking, the way you press a bruise to confirm it's still there.
The first time she said the new whitening was "settling weird.
" The second time she didn't say anything at all, she just smiled at her own reflection for a second too long.
Not a happy smile, a diagnostic one, and then she caught me watching and put the smile away fast and asked, too bright, whether I thought the ballroom lighting at the country club was warm or cool, because she wanted to know how her dress would read.
I said warm, definitely warm, country clubs always go warm, you'll look gorgeous. And she relaxed, because warm light forgives, and I knew, filing my forms, exactly what the broadcast panels by the step-and-repeat were going to do to warm light's forgiveness at seven thirty on Saturday.
Wednesday, Brielle's teeth were still white.
I knew because she posted a selfie to the practice Instagram, "feeling myself before the big night #JacobsSmiles #CedarHollowsBrightest," lips parted, gleaming.
I liked it from the practice's own account, which I had access to, because I was so helpful, and then I went into the office bathroom and pressed my forehead against the cool tile and breathed.
Thursday, something was off in the selfie she didn't post but Aubrey mentioned at the desk, frowning, that Brielle thought the whitening looked "weird in some lights," kind of "shadowy," and had it ever done that.
I said that the new system was so strong it sometimes took a day to even out, that she should just give it a while, and it'd be perfect for the cameras.
Aubrey said that made sense and I went back to my filing while down the hall my husband's mistress checked her teeth in the bathroom mirror under the fluorescent light, turning her head, telling herself it was the lighting.
It was not the lighting.
The night before the gala, Spencer came home humming. He'd had his hair cut. He laid his tux out on the bed, the good one, and his pocket square, and he was happy, genuinely, end-to-end happy.
"Big night tomorrow, Kel. Ten years. Can you believe it."
And I looked at the man, the lucky idiot, the loyal idiot, standing in our bedroom in front of his tux glowing with the certainty that tomorrow was going to be the best night of his life, and I said, with my whole face, with all my teeth, "I really can't wait."