NICK
BEFORE
June arrives, bringing with it all the heat and humidity of a typical summer in Chicagoland. Overnight, the mercury on the thermometer soars to eighty-some degrees in a climate known for having two seasons: hot and cold. I make the difficult decision to switch on the air conditioners in our home and the practice, though my mind calculates the sum of the rising cost of the electricity bills already, anxious long before they come. With the arrival of June, a lease payment was due, an imposing number that boggles my mind. I didn’t have it to spare, though I was able to maneuver an extension of fifteen days. It buys me time. I’m hoping that by the fifteenth of June I have enough saved up.
But I’m not just thinking about this lease payment; I’m considering the bigger picture. I’m thinking of ways to save on rent and other expenses. Without Connor my patient load is again nearing full, though I’m waiting on pins and needles for some sort of discriminatory discharge lawsuit to arrive from a disgruntled Dr. C, as I’m sure it will. I’ve tried calling him to talk it out. Many times. He won’t return my calls.
The good news is that I’ve been doing well on the offtrack betting, though it’s a slow accumulation, thanks to daily limits imposed on the online gambling site, a gradual buildup of money that I hope amounts to something before a complaint arrives from Melinda Grey. I’ve advanced from merely horse racing to placing bets on the NBA playoff games. I’m not much of a basketball whiz, but have inundated myself with rankings and statistical analysis, point spreads, to place my money on the teams with the best odds. The Warriors are a heavy favorite, and so I put my money on the Warriors and watch as they take the first game of the series in overtime. Clara sits beside me on the sofa as I press down hard on her sciatic nerve with the pad of a thumb, Maisie on the floor before us, scribbling in a coloring book. “I never knew you were such a basketball fan,” she says, and I think to myself how suddenly there are many things she doesn’t know.
“You have a new patient today,” says Stacy the next day as I step from the humid morning air into the serenity of the air-conditioned office. There is music on, some sort of ambient music that overrides the show on the wall-mount TV screen; the room smells of coffee, reminding me of the things I cannot have. Caffeine. A Weber grill.
Stacy smiles. A new patient is, of course, like gold dust around here. I shed my car keys and sunglasses, and she wishes me good luck. I return the smile. There was a time I didn’t need luck, but now I do.
Coming into the open-concept office space, my hygienist does what she always does and introduces me to the patient, telling me something I don’t already know about the patient’s personal life, something other than what is happening with his or her teeth. It’s rapport-building, a means of showing our patients we care. Not just about their teeth, but about them. Them as people. As human beings. And so my hygienist Jan says, “Good morning, Dr. Solberg. We have Katherine here. Katherine Cobb, who’s just relocated to the Midwest from the Pacific Northwest,” and as I drop down into my stool and extend my hand in greeting, I have the surprise of my life when, sitting there on the dental chair is not Katherine Cobb, but Kat Ables—the woman who, twelve years ago, I was absolutely certain I would spend the rest of my life with.
“Kat,” I say. My mouth gapes open; I don’t have the wherewithal to make it stop. She looks unchanged to me, still eighteen years old and gorgeous. We didn’t break up. I went to college. We said we’d keep in touch, and then, somehow or other, we didn’t keep in touch. “Kat Ables,” I say, though I know she’s no longer Kat Ables. Worse so, I gather that she’s married Steve Cobb who I also went to high school with, this larger-than-life presence that I hoped I’d never hear of again. He was a wrestler at the time, an imposing figure who walked the halls with a whole underclass entourage surrounding him. He always had a thing for Kat.
“Long time, no see,” she says, and she smiles this extraordinarily white smile, and I know the last thing I’m going to be able to focus on right now is her teeth. “How are you doing, Nick?” she asks, and I send Jan on an errand so that for a few moments Kat and I can be alone. Jan takes her time; she doesn’t hurry back, though the supply closet is right across the hallway, and all I asked for were more cotton pellets. Even Jan knows I don’t need any cotton pellets.
“Well,” I stammer. “I’m doing well,” though I step on the wrong foot pedal and force her head down when I meant to lift her upright. Kat laughs. She has the most melodic laugh, airy and carefree. Clara, thwarted by her mother’s dementia and eight months of a wearisome pregnancy, rarely laughs anymore. But Kat still laughs, and the ease of it, the simplicity, makes me laugh, too.
“What a coincidence this is,” I say, knowing it’s not at all a coincidence.
“My family and I just moved into the area,” she tells me, “and I knew you were here. I guess you can say I’ve been cyberstalking you,” and I blush because, instead of feeling any sort of ominous dread over the fact, I let it go to my head. I find that I like that suggestion, of Kat searching for me online.
“Cyber-stalking?” I ask, and she tells me abashedly how she Googled my name and, as luck would have it, stumbled upon my practice’s website. She was due for an exam anyway, and needed to find a new dentist. She leans forward in her chair, and, like that, our professional gap transforms into something more familiar and intimate. Her fingers twiddle with the edges of the paper napkin that lies across her chest, though the Kat I knew was never fidgety, never nervous. She’s changed, as have I. Twelve years ago she said she’d put her world on hold for me. She’d wait. But she didn’t wait.
“I tried to talk myself out of coming here. I wasn’t sure I was ready to see you,” she says, and then more softly, almost apologetically, “I wasn’t sure you wanted to see me.”
“Please, Kat,” I say, trying hard to be nonchalant. “Of course I wanted to see you. It’s fantastic to see you. It’s so good to see you,” though mostly what I remember of my relationship with Kat were stolen moments in the back seat of my parents’ cars, romantic moments that were brief and hurried and filled with anything but romance, regular intervals of breaking up and making up, hurt feelings, teenage melodrama, walking around with her on my arm just for show. But still, there was something so exhilarating about being with Kat.
Even at the time I knew it wasn’t love. But it felt like love for two teenagers who’d never before been in love. And then I met Clara, and suddenly love came with a certain clarity I’d never known before.
“I have a son now,” she tells me, and I tell her I have a daughter. A wife, a daughter and a dog. And another baby on the way.
“Tell me about your son,” I say and she does. He’s the antithesis of everything his father is, she says. “You remember Steve?” she asks, and I nod and say that I do. Gus—Kat and Steve’s son—doesn’t like sports. Unlike Steve, he’s narrowly built, tall and thin and more musically inclined, the kind of kid obsessed with video games and his air guitar and Harry Potter books. That’s the way Kat describes him, and from the impression my mind forms, I like this kid already. He’s my kind of guy.
“He looks nothing like Steve. He acts nothing like Steve. He’s shy, sensitive. All Steve wants to do is teach him some basic wrestling skills, but at twelve Gus shows no interest in wrestling at all.”
Kat and Steve started dating about three days after I left for college, she tells me—he apparently swooped in just at the right time, while Kat was grieving my loss—and before she knew it, there was a baby on the way. It’s the reason she never answered my emails or returned my calls. “Steve wanted to make an honest woman out of me, and I said okay. You remember my parents,” she says, with a roll of the eye. I do remember her parents. Strict and demanding of total obedience. They scared the heck out of me. I can see why she and Steve decided to get married, but hope for her sake that she was at least in a little bit of love.
“You’re happy?” I ask, and she shrugs her shoulders and says sometimes. Sometimes she’s happy, though I have this sense that there’s so much more she wants to say.
“You?” she asks, and though there’s a part of me that thinks she wants me to say that I’m not, I say that I am. I’m happy. I have a beautiful wife and a child and another on the way. Of course I’m happy.
“I’m so glad,” she says and then she presses a warm hand to either side of my cheeks as she used to do, and forces me to see her eye to eye. “I’ve always hoped that wherever you were and whatever you were doing, you were happy.”
“I’m happy,” I say again with a smile.
And it’s then that I catch the sound of applause, of movement in my purview. It’s Jan, I’m sure, returning for the dental exam, and I half expect to see her standing there with cotton pellets in hand. Except that when my eyes cast a glance toward the doorway it’s not Jan, but rather Connor, standing there in his dental smock, clapping his hands at me. An ovation. Suddenly Kat’s hands feel like fire on my skin, and I draw back quickly and rise to my feet.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, my voice circumspect, but also panicked. What did Connor hear, and what did Connor see?
“I have patients to see,” he says, his voice composed as he turns and parades down the hallway.
“Give me a minute,” I say to Kat, circling the end of the dental chair. “I’ll be right back,” and I leave before she can say anything. I follow Connor down the hall, calling to him, though he doesn’t stop. I jog to catch up.
I set a hand on his shoulder and force him to look at me.
“Does Clara know?” he asks and I don’t reply. He shrugs, jaw set, eyes wide. “Far be it for me to give marital advice, but I think you know as well as I do that sooner or later, the wife always finds out in the end.”
I’m speechless. I can’t reply. My mind is rattled by the fact that Kat Ables sits in the very next room. A vision floods my memories then—the last time I laid eyes on Kat—overcomplicating my thought process, Kat’s skin as a pastel painting, the spindly bones of her vertebrae as she stood, back to me, undressed save for the flimsy sheet she held around her waist like a toga, gazing over a shoulder as I left. Until next time, she’d said, and I’d replied, See ya, because it didn’t occur to me that I might never see her again, not for over twelve years when she showed up in my dental chair.
“If you don’t mind,” says Connor, drawing away, a patient file in his hands. He flips through it breezily. “I have an appointment,” he says.
“The hell you do,” I snap, feeling suddenly angry, trying to reach across him and snatch the file out of his hands. On his face is this goading look, a challenge. He’s wondering what I’m going to do about it, and whether or not I have it in me to make him leave. “You don’t work here anymore,” I say, “or have you forgotten that already?” And somehow in that moment I forget completely that there was a time that Connor and I used to be friends. I expunge from memory all those late-night confessionals over endless bottles of Labatt Blue. I cross my arms across my chest and take a step closer to him. Connor isn’t bigger than me, but he is stronger, a rock climber and a motorcyclist, the kind who believes he’s invincible and has nothing to lose.
But in this moment, I, too, have so little left to lose.
“I’d hate for Clara to find out about the blonde,” he says, but I call his bluff on this and say, “You wouldn’t.”
He assures me he would.
“I’ll give you three seconds to gather your things and leave,” I say, as the office ladies step foot into the hallway to see what the fuss is all about, “and then I’m calling the police.”
He stands there, holding his ground, hands placed on his hips. I forget about Kat in my dental chair, my wife at home, combing through endless parenting websites for the perfect baby name. I forget about horse races and basketball games, and think only of what it would feel like for my fist to connect with the side of Connor’s face. There is so much anger in me in this one single moment, so much rage I didn’t know I had.
And then I begin to count, grateful that by three he leaves, though there’s a nagging thought in the back of my brain that Connor and I aren’t through yet, and that he’s only toying with me, planning his counterplay.