Teeth and Boyfriends
by Diane Payne
With great reluctance, I agree to meet a cousin for an outside lunch, and when she sees me pedal up to the restaurant, she gets out of her van carrying a couple boxes of knick knacks from her dead parent’s home, and shoves them in my bike pannier, falsely claiming they were belongings of my very long dead mother, while asking why I don’t have a car no more, then she grumbles about having to wear a damn mask when we go inside to order, where she mutters loudly about how expensive everything is, but those day old pig-in-the-blankets are half price, and she whispers loudly that she bets they will be free when we finish eating since they will be closing, and the people behind the counter look at us uncomfortably, even though this Dutch bakery is filled with penny pinchers because that’s the way things roll in our town, and when we sit outside, masks off, all her food flies out of her mouth and lands on me as she tells me how her son and she hate masks, and can you believe people would vote for that Kamalolyha, or whatever her name is, is she Black or Indian, and I move my chair backwards before announcing I am a Democrat, and this causes way more food to spew between her crooked teeth, landing on my face during our lovely Covid lunch, and she was just at the dentist before our appointment, and that cancer really made a mess of her teeth, yet, I remember her teeth as being frightening my entire life, about as frightening as her politics, and then she reveals she found $80,000 stuffed in envelopes from her dead husband, and he was so cheap he wouldn’t pay to fix the fence, and I say now she can fix her teeth, and she groans about Medicare, and it isn’t until the next day that I look through the boxes and actually find something interesting, an article about my mom when she was young and in a car accident near the Hope College campus, and how all the girls from the dormitory ran outside to look at the wrecked cars and my wrecked mom before she was whisked away to the hospital, my mom who never got past the fifth grade, and these college girls oohing and ahhing over her handsome boyfriend and her mangled body must have caused her great discomfort, because years later, my mother told me how she should have married this boyfriend who took such good care of her after the accident, but she married my drunk dad instead, and now, after all these decades, I have a name for this now dead boyfriend and start looking him up, and discover he was not only a plumber for the city, but a coach, and quite the community guy, and I take a photo of the car crash article and send it to my brother, who never responds, and to my sister, who texts back: we would have had a different life, and I wonder if my mother ever ran into this old boyfriend with his wife, and how ashamed she must have felt with my father always in the paper and on the local radio because of his drunken escapades, and this boyfriend may have been in the paper with the teams he coached and the drains he repaired, and my cousin’s mother must have kept this article all these years, a reminder of the life her baby sister could have had, while my cousin just stuffed the article in the box with weird things that belonged to her dead mother that she couldn’t bear to dump, and her biggest loss was that they dumped those pig-in-the-blankets as she walked into the bakery to buy them, and mine, well mine seems petty compared to my mother’s loss.
