Chapter 10
NORA
Five days after marrying a man with armed terminals in several countries, I'm scraping plaque from the back of a retired teacher's lower incisors.
She has spent forty minutes telling me about her sister's divorce through a succession of suction breaks. Konstantin's security man waits in the hall with the patient intake form I handed him half an hour ago. Another guard sits near reception pretending to read a magazine from last spring.
So far, neither has frightened anyone.
My wedding band is sealed under a blue glove. The diamond Galina insisted I wear remains locked at the residence because its setting catches on latex, hair, and anything else a hygienist needs to touch. Here, the silver ring becomes a slight pressure beneath my finger whenever I change instruments.
Nobody in the treatment chair bows to it. Patients arrive with coffee stains behind their front teeth, questions about insurance, or the conviction that bleeding gums are hereditary. They've come for the same work I did before my face appeared beside Konstantin's in the news.
The teacher closes her mouth around the suction tip and then lifts one finger.
"That husband of yours looks severe," she says once I remove it. "Does he floss?"
"He will."
"You didn't answer me."
"He doesn't yet, but he will."
Her eyes crease above the protective glasses. I return to the tooth near her tongue while she settles deeper into the chair.
The clinic smells like mint polish, gloves, and the sharp clean trace left by sterilizing solution.
Cabinet doors close in the next room. Farther down the hall, a handpiece begins its thin mechanical whine before Amina tells someone to open wider, ordinary sounds returning me to a scale of life where every problem fits inside a mouth.
These sounds used to disappear while I worked. After five days of gates, radios, and men touching their coats whenever a door opens, I hear each clinic noise with gratitude.
My patient has a rough deposit behind one front tooth that she insists wasn't present six months ago. I show it to her in the mirror before removing the last of it. She looks at the tiny white piece on my instrument with personal betrayal.
The instrument requires a lighter angle near the gumline. I brace one finger against the neighboring tooth, following the curve until the roughness gives way under the tip. This problem has a visible cause, a useful tool, then a result I can prove with the mirror.
My shoulders release while I polish the clean surface.
"Floss," I tell her.
"Tell your husband first."
"I'm seeing him tonight."
"Good. Marriage should improve somebody."
I finish the appointment without mentioning that our wedding occurred under a criminal deadline. She leaves with a new toothbrush, a printed care sheet, and complete confidence that my most urgent marital problem is Konstantin's gums.
By ten, three more patients have passed through the room. One complains that the cinnamon polish tastes like furniture. Another falls asleep while I work around a mouth prop. The last presents photographs of a grandchild before allowing me to recline the chair.
Their lives have continued through my missing week, with one loose crown and a teenager's lost retainer. The staff ordered the wrong size gloves, leaving two unopened cases stacked beside the sterilizer. The clinic absorbed my absence without turning it into either abandonment or tragedy.
Tess appears in the doorway before I can clean the chair. "Your patient asked whether the man in reception is single."
"Which one?"
"The one who has been holding the same magazine upside down for twenty minutes. This is less alarming than I expected, although I reserve the right to change my mind if anyone searches my lunch."
I look through the narrow window. The guard turns a page without changing his expression. "Tell her he's committed to literature."
Tess comes inside, closing the door with her hip. Her curls are pulled into a loose knot that has begun escaping around her face. "Did you give them a reason?"
"I brought a metal fork, so apparently I enjoy risk."
The humor leaves her eyes before her mouth does. "Are you all right?"
Almost everyone I've seen since the wedding has asked me the same question. The police asked first and Galina, the other women, and every person who saw gunfire in the news before photographs of white roses. Tess asks from four feet away with a disinfectant wipe in her hand.
"I'm safe today," I tell her. "The clinic still feels like mine, and he kept every rule about coming back."
"You're still dodging half of it."
I pull the paper cover from the headrest. "I know."
Tess waits, giving me room to supply the rest.
Last night, I invited Konstantin into my private suite. He stood outside until I opened the door, despite the key already resting in his palm. The memory warms the skin beneath my scrub top, though what stays with me is how easily he handed the key back when he left this morning.
"I'm more all right than I should be after five days," I say.
Tess studies my face, then drops the used wipe into the bin. "I can work with that answer for now."
She doesn't ask for bedroom details or tell me that one good night erases the way the marriage began. Tess has known me for years. With her, I can desire Konstantin while remaining angry about the choice he made for me. Nobody in this room demands that one feeling cancel the other.
The next patient is already filling out a medication change at reception. Tess returns to her desk while I strip the chair, letting the work carry us forward.
At noon, the security man in the next room becomes my patient. He's broad through the shoulders, with a close haircut that does nothing to soften the scar near one eyebrow. When he opens his mouth, I find gum inflammation beside two molars.
"You haven't flossed this week," I say.
"We had a wedding."
"That explanation means less here than you think."
His eyes move toward the open doorway where his partner covers the corridor.
"He's not going to save you."
The guard submits to the cleaning with less resistance than several men half his size. I send him away with floss picks in the inner pocket of his black coat. Before leaving, he checks the staff exit and then tells me the route home remains clear.
For one full minute after the door closes, the only thing in my life that needs protection is a patient's enamel.
I use the staff room to call Grandma.
The door has no lock, so I turn on the small fan above the refrigerator before sitting at the table farthest from the hall. My guard remains outside the staff area under the privacy rule. He can see both exits without hearing whom I call.
Grandma's name waits at the top of my recent list under five calls from this week. None lasted less than twenty minutes. Every call proves how badly I minimized our relationship during the security interview.
The number connects before the second ring. Her face fills the screen from an angle that shows her forehead, one eye, and most of the ceiling fan.
"You're holding the phone too low," I say.
"I can see you."
"I can see one eyebrow."
"It's my better one."
The image jerks until Grandma appears in the center of the screen.
She sits at her kitchen table wearing the blue cardigan I gave her last winter.
Behind her, snow brightens the narrow window above the sink.
A bowl of clementines rests beside the ceramic rooster Grandfather won at a church raffle despite refusing to buy a ticket.
Seeing the kitchen opens a small ache beneath my ribs.
I know which cupboard sticks when the heat runs too high, where the linoleum lifts near the old pipe, and how the grocery list curls under a magnet from a motel we visited when I was twelve.
No camera follows anyone through that room. No guard has learned its doors.
The yellow curtain behind her used to hang in my apartment.
Grandma hemmed it after Grandfather died, then announced that crying in a dark kitchen was inefficient.
I started bringing dinner on Thursdays that same month.
By spring, I was checking smoke-alarm batteries or leaving cash inside the sugar jar even though she kept returning it through increasingly inventive methods.
"You look tired," Grandma says. "Rich people should have better pillows."
"The pillows are fine."
"Then your husband is the problem."
"He does take up a great deal of space."
"So did your grandfather. I trained him toward the edge."
I lower my voice as Tess passes the staff-room door. "I want to send someone to check the back steps. You said the lower board moved."
"The neighbor fixed it yesterday. She used wood, Nora, before you ask.
Screws were also involved, and I supervised.
" She refuses before I finish offering a contractor.
She doesn't want anyone assessing the house, sending furniture, or suggesting that she move somewhere with gates.
When I mention having groceries delivered during the worst snow, she informs me that the market is three blocks away.
Her independence is real. So is her habit of calling when the basement light fails, though she has already replaced the bulb before I arrive. We have spent years disguising devotion as errands, making care look accidental so neither of us has to admit how much of our week bends toward the other.
"I have lived through winters before your husband started purchasing them," she says.
"He doesn't own the weather."
"Give him time."
A knock sounds from Grandma's back door. She carries the phone through the kitchen, showing me sections of wallpaper with every step. The neighbor from two doors down enters in a puffy purple coat, stamping snow from her boots onto the mat.
"I'm leaving this with you until Sunday," the neighbor says, placing a brass key in Grandma's hand. "The plumber may come while I'm with my sister. If he leaves mud again, use the good towels to frighten him."