Chapter 10
The tenth-anniversary gala for Jacobs Family Dentistry was held in the ballroom of the Cedar Hollow Country Club, the one with the chandelier the size of a parade float.
I wore navy, because navy photographs as dignity, and because I wanted to be the calmest color in every picture taken that night, and I was.
I arrived on Spencer's arm. I walked into that ballroom on the arm of the man whose practice I was about to detonate, and I smiled at the Chamber of Commerce and the dentists from the neighboring towns and the man from the bank who'd financed the second location, and I let Spencer introduce me as "my wife, Kelly, my better half, she keeps me honest.”
That got a laugh, the keeps-me-honest. There was a silent auction.
There was a string quartet. There was a step-and-repeat banner with the practice's logo and the slogan in four-hundred-dollar gold, CEDAR HOLLOW'S brIGHTEST SMILES, and a photographer stationed in front of it whose entire job that night was to make people stand in front of the words and smile.
Brielle was already there when we arrived, because of course she was, the face of the practice, and she was in the green dress.
It was a good dress. I'll give her that.
Emerald, off the shoulder, a green that knew it was being looked at.
She'd had her hair done and her makeup done and she looked, walking toward us across the ballroom under the parade-float chandelier, genuinely beautiful.
She came up and air-kissed Spencer, very professional, very boss-and-office-manager.
She said, "Dr. Jacobs, the room looks incredible," and air-kissed me.
“Kelly, you look stunning, navy's so your color.”
She smiled at me in the green dress under the warm pre-event lighting of the country club, and her teeth, in that light, looked fine. A little dull, maybe. A little shadowed at the gum line, like she'd had red wine, except she hadn't, not yet.
You'd have to know. You'd have to be looking.
I was looking, and even I almost couldn't see it yet, and a small cold thread of fear went through me, that I'd gotten the chemistry wrong, that the verdict wouldn't come, that she'd glide through the whole night gleaming and I'd have greened a bag of practice teeth in my garage for nothing.
Then they turned on the lights for the cameras.
The news crew had set up near the step-and-repeat, and at seven thirty they switched on the broadcast lights, those hard white panels that wash everything flat and bright and merciless.
The lights that exist specifically to show a thing exactly as it is, and the photographer called for the practice team to gather in front of the banner for the big group shot, Dr. Jacobs and his staff, ten years of Cedar Hollow's Brightest Smiles.
And they all lined up, Aubrey and Donna and the new sterilization kid and the hygienists, and Spencer in the center in his tux, and Brielle at his right hand, front and center, the face of the practice, exactly where he'd put her, and the photographer said the thing photographers say.
"Big smiles, everybody! On three. One, two, three, Jacobs Smiles!"
And Brielle smiled her whole-face smile, full, wide, the brightest in the room, directly into the merciless white light, for the camera, for the news crew, for the photographer, for the whole assembled town of Cedar Hollow.
Her teeth were green.
Not subtle. Not a shadow at the gum line.
The lights had found what the warm lighting hid, and under that white wash her smile was the deep wet green of a pond in August, of a thing left out in the rain, of rot, every tooth, top and bottom, the full coverage I'd designed.
The brighter the smile the more total the verdict, and she had no idea, that's the best part.
She was beaming, she held the smile through three, four, five frames, “Jacobs Smiles," click, click, click, the news camera's light steady on her, the photographer getting his shots, and somewhere in the second row a woman gasped, just a little, just enough.
The photographer lowered his camera. I watched his face do the thing faces do.
He looked at his screen.
He looked back up at Brielle, at her smile, still beaming, still holding, and he didn't know what to say, because what do you say?
And into that silence Aubrey, sweet Aubrey, leaned over and whispered something to Brielle, and I watched my husband's mistress's smile falter, and falter again, and I watched her reach up and touch her own lip.
I watched her turn to the photographer and say, "Can I see," and I watched the photographer, who was a kind man and did not want to, turn the camera around and show her the screen.
She made a sound I had not planned for. I'd planned for everything else, the chemistry and the timing and the lights, but I had not planned for the sound, which was small and high and entirely human.
The sound of a person seeing their own face go wrong in front of two hundred people, and for one second, exactly one, I felt it, the thing I wasn't supposed to feel, a pull of pity so sharp it almost folded me.
Because she was a person, she was a real person standing in a green dress with a green smile in front of the whole town, and then she straightened up and turned to my husband and hissed, low, but I was close, I was always close, "Spencer, what is WRONG with this whitening? My teeth are GREEN!”
And she called him Spencer, in front of the staff, in front of the banner, Spencer, not Dr. Jacobs.
The private word, the one she only used when I wasn't in the building, and she used it in panic without thinking, and Donna in billing heard it.
Aubrey heard it, and a hygienist heard it, and I watched the word land and saw three faces do quiet math.
It was unraveling already, you see. The green did half of it and the panic did the rest.
The next hour was the longest, slowest car crash I've ever had the privilege of attending. Brielle fled to the bathroom and came back having tried to fix it with nothing, because you cannot fix it.
The dye was set in the etch, sealed by the very treatment meant to make her shine, and there is no concealer for a tooth.
She tried smiling with her mouth closed. She tried not smiling, which on the face of the practice, on the night of the gala, reads as its own catastrophe. People noticed. People always notice the person trying not to be noticed.
The news crew, who'd come for a feel-good local-business segment, kept their lights warm and their questions careful, but I saw the reporter murmur to her cameraman, and I saw the cameraman get a few seconds of Brielle from across the room, just in case, because that's the job.
I had a navy-dress job too, which was to be seen being lovely and oblivious, and I did it.
I let the bank man's wife corner me by the silent auction and tell me about her daughter's braces, and I bid forty dollars on a spa basket I would never collect, and I held a glass of white wine I did not drink.
I made my face do gracious-wife while across the ballroom my entire revenge bloomed in real time on another woman's mouth.
At one point Marsha found me. Marsha, in a sequined cardigan, with a glass of the country club's worst chardonnay, sidled up next to me and watched Brielle try to laugh with her lips shut at a table of dentists.
Marsha said, low, out of the side of her mouth, the wisdom of the whole parking-lot-and-thermos tradition behind it, "Something is going on with that girl's teeth."
And I said, "Is there?" and Marsha said, "Mark my words," and I marked them, I marked them so hard, and I clinked my undrunk wine against her bad chardonnay and we stood there together, the woman who'd seen everything and the woman who'd done everything, watching it land.
And Spencer. Spencer gave his speech. He stood up in his tux at the front of the ballroom, under the parade-float chandelier, beside his oversized check for the children's dental fund, and he announced the second location.
“Our second location," he said, and the bank man clapped, and Spencer talked about ten years of trust, ten years of Cedar Hollow's Brightest Smiles, and he gestured, in the middle of it, warm, proud, to his team, to the face of his practice.
To Brielle, as he said, “and none of it would be possible without my incredible staff," and two hundred people turned to look at the incredible staff, and the face of the practice smiled, reflexively, helplessly, because that is what you do when a room turns to look at you.
The green smile flashed across the whole ballroom one more time, and a teenager at table eleven, somebody's bored kid, raised a phone.
I knew what that was. That was tomorrow arriving early.
I sat at my table in my dignified navy with my hands folded and my chicken untouched, the country club chicken, not as good as mine, and I watched my husband finish his speech to scattered, distracted, unsettled applause.
I watched him not understand yet, not even slightly, that the best night of his life had already ended, and I thought about how he'd told me, just last night, in front of his laid-out tux, big night tomorrow, can you believe it.
I'd said I couldn't wait.
I really couldn't.