Every Last Lie

“It’s all right,” she says, and, “No bother,” though her eyes inquire about Maisie’s outburst, and I palliate the truth by saying, “She doesn’t want to go grocery shopping. She’d rather stay home and play,” though I make no mention of the black car, which has her instantly terrorized, or the fact that my four-year-old has some latent belief that my husband was killed.

“Grocery shopping is so hard with the children,” Emily bemoans with a dramatic eye roll, though her little Teddy stands obediently beside her, carrying the plastic shopping bag. “Would you like to come home with Teddy and me?” asks Emily then, as she squats at the knees and leans in close to Maisie, her voice subdued in a way meant for kids’ ears. “Give Mommy a break for a while?” And as Maisie nods her slow approval, Emily rises up and says to me, “If it’s okay with you, Clara. Maisie can play with Teddy for a while. Let Felix and you shop. It would give me a break, too—they can entertain each other,” she says, assuaging my immediate concern with, “Theo is gone this week. An auto show in Massachusetts. He won’t be home for a few days,” and at this I nod my head numbly. I say okay, though still I have reservations about sending Maisie off with someone else, and yet there are other things on my mind, which trump these reservations.

“She’s had an accident,” I say apologetically, and Emily tells me it’s no bother. She can borrow something of Teddy’s while the clothes dry. “If you’re sure,” I say, and Emily says she’s sure. “Just let me move her car seat,” I say, but Emily says not to bother. She has an extra booster seat Maisie can use, and so instead I press my lips to Maisie’s forehead in a simple adieu.

I have only two things on my mind.

Infant formula.

Black car.

NICK (#uefb29d40-faeb-5281-9a58-0835ba6e097f)

BEFORE

Connor is laid out in the dental chair when I come into the exam room. He’s flat on his back, staring up at The View on the ceiling-mounted TV, feet crossed at the ankles, hands folded across his abdomen. It isn’t just his predilection for being lazy that’s lured him to the TV, or the fact that some supermodel is the featured guest. Not today anyway. We both had patients scheduled for 11:00 a.m., both of whom failed to show. Two more flew the coop, is the way Nancy told us about it, while sipping from her mug. They were siblings, which made it better somehow, just one mother or father deciding to take their children’s dental work elsewhere, rather than two separate individuals beating a hasty retreat. There were any number of things working against us, but two in particular stood out: a surfeit of bad online reviews of late, which I was certain were all one Melinda Grey with countless aliases, and a new dentist in town, Dr. Jeremy Shepherd.

Dr. Shepherd was the kind of practitioner with top-of-the-line everything, lavish prizes for referrals, direct mail flyers that promised free new-client exams complete with X-rays, forcing my clients to jump ship. I couldn’t blame them. Word on the street is that he’s an upstanding guy, handsome, a philanthropist—he’s apparently done charity work in Africa with the Global Dental Relief, providing free dental work for hundreds of impoverished people, which is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never found the time. He has an orthodontist and an oral surgeon on staff so that they can serve everyone’s individual needs. There is no need to see a specialist elsewhere. And if a patient refers a friend, they’re entered into a raffle to win a Weber grill, black porcelain, sixty inches tall by sixty inches wide, with three stainless-steel burners and cast-iron cooking grates, along with all the fancy cooking utensils and an apron that reads BBQ Master to boot. I’ve been on their website, staring covetously at the grill. It was almost enough to make me jump ship, too.

Clara caught me one night staring at the grill online, coming up from behind, warm hands reclining on my shoulder blades as I quickly minimized the screen. It was months ago, when Clara was still comfortable and trim, and the baby inside her belly was only as big as a brussels sprout and not yet a honeydew.

“What’s that?” she asked, but I said nothing because by then it was gone.

“No, really,” she spurred, reaching over my shoulder for the wireless mouse, so that she could maximize the screen. Clara is many things—warm, kind, breathtaking—but she’s not dumb.

And so there it was again, staring me in the eye. That grill.

“You’re looking for a new grill?” Clara asked, sitting beside me at the table, hand now resting on my knee. “What’s wrong with the grill we have?” she asked, and I claimed that one of the burners didn’t work, and the flame took forever to ignite. It wasn’t true, of course—our run-of-the-mill grill worked just fine—but Clara bought it for the time being. And so there that night, with Clara by my side, I checked the price of a similar grill online, wondering if I could host a grill giveaway, too, and try to reclaim the patients I’d lost to other dentists around town. Maybe if I had my own grill giveaway for patient referrals, they’d return, like migrating birds returning to a nest year after year. But that was only a pipe dream, of course.

“Maisie in bed already?” I asked, hoping to derail or at least defer this conversation for the time being. I didn’t like lying to Clara.

“Yes,” she said, because I hadn’t yet raised my eyes from the computer screen to see that she wasn’t being trailed by a tired child. “She’s out cold,” said Clara, and then she returned her attention to the grill, hand on my knee, spinning tiny circles on the fabric, moving higher up my thigh. “Do we have the money for a new grill?” Clara asked, seeing the way my eyes scoured the website for a grill—those exorbitant price ranges filling me with inexplicable hatred toward Dr. Shepherd, who, like me, was only a man with a dream, and a better business sense it seemed. My body didn’t pay attention to the pursuits of Clara’s puttering hand, didn’t even notice. Any other day I would have noticed. But in that moment I was intent on only one thing: getting that grill.

What Clara didn’t understand was that this grill meant everything to me. That my practice, our family, our sustenance and livelihood all hinged on a Weber grill. It was hyperbole, and yet it wasn’t. My business was going to hell in a handbasket, and I had to figure out a way to make it stop. But I didn’t tell this to Clara, who had a brussels sprout in her womb and didn’t need to worry about anything more. It wouldn’t do any good for both of us to worry, and anyway, somewhere deep inside my mind I stupidly believed a grill could save me, could save us, could change the expected course of our lives.

“What about something a little less fancy?” Clara asked, as I drooled over the stainless-steel burners and the cast-iron cooking grates. But I don’t want another grill, I nearly whined. I want this one.

It struck a nerve in me, that for as hard as I worked and as much as I sacrificed for my job and my patients, I couldn’t afford a grill, any grill, whatever grill I pleased. But it didn’t make me angry. Instead it left a void, and I found myself feeling desperate to fill it.

I gazed at Clara then, about to explain with logic and reason why this was the grill I needed to have, seeing for the first time what I’d been blind to see, as she nuzzled into my ear and whispered this time, lips pressed to cartilage so I could feel her words all the way down to my toes, “I said that Maisie is out cold.” Clara sat there beside me, hair falling shamelessly into her eyes, lips painted a bloodred, which for Clara only ever meant one thing, and as she breathed into my ear this time, “She’s out like a light,” I felt my hands rise to her, holding on tightly to what was already mine, terrified for the first time in my life that if I let go I might just lose her, too.

Clara meant everything to me, I reminded myself. Not the grill. Not the money.

Only Clara.

I grabbed ahold of her hands and drew her to me as Clara’s fingers worked their way down the buttons of my shirt with only one thing in mind, not caring for one millisecond that the blinds throughout the home were open wide, inviting neighbors to view the scene: the way I raised Clara onto the tabletop, leaning into her, relieved that Maisie still slept in a toddler bed then, with knob covers on her bedroom door handle. There was no way for her to come toddling into the kitchen to find Daddy trying hard to wriggle out of his pants as Mommy wrenched the shirt from her arms, dropping it like hot lava to the tile floors.

“Trust me,” I said, sliding my hands under the hem of a flouncy skirt, the one that vaunted Clara’s spun-out legs, which happened to be the first thing I fell in love with about her: those legs. Those persuasive legs, which she wrapped around me then as if she knew all along this hang-up I had with her legs. She did it on purpose: the skirt, the legs, Maisie in bed earlier than was the norm so she could catch me before my evening torpor set in, the three beers I’d already consumed starting to slow my movements, to have their way with my mind. She pressed her lips to mine, kissing me deeply and completely, as I buried myself into her, trying to think about Clara and only Clara. Clara wanted me in a way that only she had ever wanted me. She gave my life purpose and meaning.