4. The Chamber Mixer
The Chamber Mixer
Danny Obregón had, on examination, in the courtyard, in daylight, with a penlight and a mirror I keep in my bag: two old composites, mild incisal wear, and the sturdiest set of molars in Santa Barbara County.
"Nine is a lot," I said.
"So I don't need it."
"You don't need one of them, Danny. Not one. You've got a little wear on your lowers from grinding and if you want a night guard I'll make you a night guard and it'll cost you a hundred and forty dollars." I folded the glossy treatment plan and handed it back. "Who told you nine?"
"The lady with the iPad." He scratched the back of his neck.
"Not the doctor. I only saw the doctor for like a minute at the end, he came in and looked and said 'good,' and then the lady did the whole thing on the screen with the pictures of my teeth.
She was real nice. She showed me how the insurance covers it all if we do it in the four visits. "
I asked him — casually, I thought, though Marisol told me later I had gone the color of the plaster — whether he'd signed anything.
He had. He'd signed the plan, and a financing form he didn't understand, and a consent, and he was booked for the first of the four visits in eleven days.
"Cancel it," I said.
"Doc—"
"Danny. Cancel it, and don't tell them why, and don't be rude about it, just say your schedule changed." I gave him back the plan. "And keep that piece of paper somewhere safe."
It's forty-one steps from my courtyard arch to the front door of the Santa Barbara Region Chamber of Commerce, which held its Business After Hours mixer the following Wednesday in the courtyard of a hotel on Carrillo, and if I had walked those forty-one steps in any other frame of mind the rest of that autumn would have gone differently. I've thought about that too.
Here is what I had in my head going in: eleven days. A thirty-four-year-old man with perfect molars had eleven days before somebody put a bur to nine of them.
Here is what I did not have in my head: a plan, a lawyer, a state dental board complaint form, or the faintest understanding that the man I was about to shout at in front of a hundred and forty people was going to be dead in ten days and that I would be the last person in Santa Barbara to publicly want him harmed.
The mixer was the usual — name tags, a cash bar, realtors.
Tess came because Tess goes to everything.
Marisol refused on principle. I got a glass of wine I didn't want and made conversation with the woman who owns the bookshop and a man who does drone photography, and then the room shifted the way a room does, and Preston Hale came in with Serena Locke half a step behind him and three young people in linen behind her, and the Chamber president got up on the little step to do the introductions.
He talked for four minutes. I remember almost none of it except the phrase "an exciting new chapter for downtown," and then Preston Hale took the microphone and did ninety seconds that were, I have to say, extremely good — self-deprecating about the banner, warm about the town, a joke about the QR code on his chin that got a real laugh — and then he said the thing.
"—and what we're really doing at Luminous is meeting people where they are.
Dentistry's been a scarcity business for a hundred years.
You wait, you save up, you come in when it hurts.
We're saying: come in Saturday. Bring the kids.
Let's do it all today, and let's use the benefits you're already paying for.
" A little shrug. "Your insurance company would rather you didn't. We'd rather you did. "
There was applause. It was a good line. And I heard, underneath it, the sound of Danny Obregón signing a financing form he didn't understand, and I put my wine down on a table and I did not decide to do anything.
That's the honest version. I didn't decide.
I was simply, suddenly, standing up in a hotel courtyard with a hundred and forty people in it, saying, in a voice that carried much further than I'd intended because the microphone was still live three feet away:
"How many crowns does a healthy thirty-four-year-old man need?"
The room did that thing. That hush that isn't silence, it's a hundred and forty people simultaneously deciding to listen.
Preston Hale looked at me. To his enormous credit — and I did not appreciate this at all at the time — he didn't look at Serena Locke first.
"Depends on the man," he said pleasantly.
"He has two composites and mild incisal wear.
That's it. That's the whole chart." My heart was going like a bird's.
"Your office gave him a plan for nine crowns, two onlays, a night guard, and a graft, staged over four visits, and had him sign a financing agreement, and he never spoke to a dentist for more than sixty seconds.
And he's not the only one. He's just the one whose mother told him to come and ask me. "
"Dr. Bennett—" the Chamber president began.
"I'm Dr. Lila Bennett, I'm across the street, and I'm aware how this looks," I said, to the room, because if you're going to burn something down you may as well be clear about it.
"I have lost forty patients to that building in six weeks and I'd be an idiot to pretend I'm not angry about it.
Be as skeptical of me as you like. Then go and get a second opinion on your treatment plan.
From anybody. From me, from Anh Trinh, from any dentist in this county, free, I'll do it for free, I'll do it on a Saturday.
" I found Danny's face in my head and finished it.
"Because the thing about a crown is that it's forever.
You grind the tooth down to a peg and it never grows back, and when the clinic that talked you into it closes — and they do close — you still have the peg. You have it for the rest of your life."
Nobody applauded that.
Preston Hale stood on the little step with the microphone in his hand and looked at me for what felt like a very long time and was probably three seconds, and what was on his face was not anger.
I've gone over it a hundred times. It wasn't anger and it wasn't embarrassment.
It was something closer to recognition — the look of a man hearing an alarm he's been hearing faintly for months and has just heard from outside his own head for the first time.
"That's a serious accusation," he said, evenly, "and it deserves a serious answer, and this isn't the room. Dr. Bennett, come and see me. Tomorrow. Bring the plan."
And that, unbelievably, was that. The Chamber president said something about the bar and the room exhaled into gossip, and I stood there shaking with my wine on a stranger's table, and Tess materialized at my elbow and said, "Well," and Serena Locke crossed the courtyard toward me with her hands out and her face full of concern.
"Lila. Lila. Come and sit, you're shaking—"
"Don't."
"You're absolutely right to be upset." She said it instantly, warmly, and it stopped me dead, because it was the last thing I expected.
"If a plan like that went out of my building then something has gone very wrong and I want the name and the chart number tonight.
Tonight, Lila. I'll have it on my desk by morning.
" She was already writing on the back of a card.
"We use a treatment-planning protocol from the management side — it's meant to be a decision aid, the doctor signs off on everything — and if somebody's been running it as a sales tool then I have an associate to fire and a great deal of apologizing to do. Please. The name."
I gave her the name.
I have had two years to decide whether I'd do it again and I still don't know.
Danny cancelled; Danny had already cancelled; Danny was safe.
But I stood in a hotel courtyard and handed Serena Locke the name of the one patient who had brought me a piece of paper, and she thanked me with both hands around mine.
Then she went to find Preston, and I watched them from across the courtyard for about half a minute — her talking, close, steadily; him not looking at her, looking past her at the wall — and then he put the microphone down on the step and walked out of the mixer alone.
I caught him at the door. I don't know why. I think I wanted to say something about the banner, or about Ostrander, or to make the afternoon smaller.
"I'll come tomorrow," I said. "With the plan."
"Don't," said Preston Hale.
He said it quietly and quickly and he wasn't looking at me — he was looking at the courtyard behind me, at the linen, at Serena Locke's cream shoulder in a crowd of realtors.
"Don't bring anything into my building," he said.
"Don't send anything to my building. Make a copy and put it somewhere that isn't your office.
" He smiled, for the room, for anyone watching, a forty-thousand-dollar smile with nothing behind it at all.
"You think I don't know what's going on in my own building? "
"What?"
"Goodnight, Dr. Bennett," said Preston Hale, and went out into Carrillo Street, and ten days later he was dead on the floor of his own whitening suite, and for five weeks I was the only person in Santa Barbara who knew that the last thing he ever said to me was a warning.