Fiction by Deborah Wessell
“Excuse me. Excuse me? Would you take ten for this?” Lois hoisted the tuxedo
pants and jacket before the bored, merciless eyes of the man accepting money.
“Tag says fifteen.”
He was middle-aged, as she was, but lean and weathered, with a graying ponytail
and bare feet. His till was a fishing tackle box. Behind him a Sunday morning crowd
picked over the debris of someone’s life, the husband who had worn the tuxedo and read Sky & Telescope, the wife given to macramé and saving cottage cheese containers. Lois wondered if they were dead, but of course it would be ghoulish to ask.
“I know the tag says fifteen. But it’s not in good shape, and anyway I only have
ten dollars with me, so…”
“So?”
“Never mind,” she murmured, but he cut her off.
“OK, ten.”
Lois was certain that the man knew she had always wanted a tuxedo jacket, just to
wear with jeans, and that she feared she was too old and overweight to carry it off. Well, was he such a prize, with that silly hair and the T-shirt with the rude slogan? She pulled out her wallet and something dropped from her purse: a slip of paper folded around two twenty dollar bills.
“Oh!” said Lois, appalled. “Oh, that’s right, I went to the cash machine last night.
I could, I mean, if you want fifteen…”
The man snorted. “Forget it.”
Lois drove home in mortification, and it was days before she could bring herself to try on her purchase. The pants, at least, made her laugh: clown pants, much too short and huge around the waist, with stiff black suspenders. Then the jacket, heavy on her shoulders. She slid her hands down the lapels and smoothed the skirts over her hips, sighing over the bulges. Then she frowned and explored a miniature inside front pocket. A small rough nugget met her fingertips and she drew it forth: a tiny ivory wedge, smooth-sided, red-brown at the jagged base. A baby tooth.
Lois had a rushing vision of a dark bedroom, a child’s breathing, a slanting slice of light from the hallway. Daddy, with his barrel belly and his suspenders and his satin lapels, on his way to some long-ago fancy night out, steps to the bedside and slips one hand gently under the pillow to exchange a silvery dime for this disgusting little miraculous tooth.
The man in the rude T-shirt, was he that child? Even if he wasn’t, he was a child once, and someone loved him, or didn’t love him. Lois was dizzied by the thought, not only of the man, but of everyone, herself and her own children and her friends and their children and oh Lord, everyone she’d ever met or would never meet and all of them, every individual on this entire warm busy planet, would someday be dead, and there would just be these little things, these objects once significant of love. The thought was marvelous but entirely too much, and Lois threw the tooth away.
Deborah Wessell writes the Wedding Planner mystery series under the name Deborah Donnelly. She is a former librarian, copywriter, and speechwriter. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her writer husband and their unruly corgis.
