fingernail, as if someone had roasted marshmallows

at an open fire on the bathroom floor, and it’s scorched above the tin

ceiling tiles too, so badly the carpenter looks

at me like I’ve been running a dogfighting ring out of my apartment, and in

his wince

I know this is going to cost, like, there-goes-the-rest-of-it

cost, just as, later that summer, in the dentist’s chair tipped toward the TV

where Darlene Rodriguez is talking about

the latest MTA accident, a bus this time, which ran out of control and

smashed into a building, killing three, including the driver.

Something similar happened on 14th Street, my dentist says, peering into

the hole

he’s made on my back molar, the one supposed to be

a cavity but is now a root canal and a crown, and I keep apologizing to him

and his friendly assistant, with the star tattooed

behind her ear, for the embarrassment — six years it’s been,

my job, the commuting, but I know

why I didn’t go in during that time, I’m thinking

of my father cleaning her teeth, more and more yellow

even though after she’d eat he’d raise her out of her chair and carry

her like the fullback he once was, lifting her off the ground into

the bathroom,

slowly brushing her teeth, wiping the spit, drool,

the toothpaste with a washcloth, and when I visited

I’d stand there helpless before so much love, unable to do anything

useful except

to watch how serious it gets, how there’s nothing serious

without an end, and that’s the only bill you’re ever going to be scared to pay,

unthinkable, because once you start paying, there’s no end

to what you’ll give, and I witnessed him do it, no bargaining, no

installment, just

give up everything, his vanity first, then his friendships,

and finally his faith. He looked at the blackened circle around her and asked

if this is how God takes then we don’t have an agreement

anymore, while I’m recording the changes

in him, so great they just obliterate any

self-consciousness, it becomes something you do, like carpentry or dentistry,

if you don’t drill this tooth now you’re going to lose it,

if you don’t give these drivers a break they’re going to fall asleep at the wheel

and smash into things. So I take the rest of the money

I earned from her death, this wealth drilled from the ground in Texas and

Indiana and Oklahoma, Rockefeller money that

bought my grandmother a sterling retirement and would have passed to

my mother

if she hadn’t died before her own, I take the money and put

it back into the new hole, and the carpenter doesn’t blink,

or even say thank you, just says he’ll make it look

like new, both he and I know he’s lying.