He looks at me like I have a bird on my head. “I didn’t marry Janie.”

“Then who did you marry?”

But before he can answer, Teddy materializes as if out of thin air from the video game aisle. I reach for his arm. “Teddy, this is Michael, an old friend of mine from when I was your age.” I prod him to shake hands, then whisper into his ear: “Now smile. With teeth.”

He pulls away. “Why?”

“Because Michael is an orthodontist. And I think you need braces.”

Michael smiles and manages to get a glimpse of Teddy’s mouth, and then mine. He hands me his card. “He does. And so do you.”

Adult Braces

Your bite is off,” Michael says, a week later in his office, his gloved fingers in my mouth, my chair tilted all the way back and the bright examination light blinding me. His mini metal dental pick taps lightly on my offending lower teeth, then hovers above my lower lip. He offers me a little hand mirror so I can participate in the conversation about the possibility of a second round of orthodontia, instead of being a passive victim like I was the first time. “You see that?”

Actually, I don’t. I’m too busy admiring my hair, which I blow-dried for once, and the perfectly thin and straight coat of eyeliner that I somehow managed to apply with a steady hand despite wearing the dog—all in preparation for my date with my orthodontist.

“I’m kidding. He’s not officially my orthodontist,” I tell Glenn when I call her from the parking lot with Teddy trailing far behind me. “I’m just going to ask him before Teddy’s appointment what he meant by his remark that I need braces, too.” As usual, I’m all over the place.

“I thought you said he was married.”

“I did, but now, in retrospect, I think I also got a divorced vibe.”

“Based on what?” Glenn always wants me to provide specifics, to show my work. In the manuscripts of the books of mine she edited, that need for substantiation appeared in the form of notes in the margin—queries on Post-it notes—Why would she say this? Or, How does she know this is what her mother is thinking? Or, Do we know if the bird on her head has thoughts and, if so, what they are? If I couldn’t answer to her satisfaction, she would make suggestions on how I could rework something to make it deeper, richer, or clearer. I can tell she doesn’t quite trust my divorced-vibes—if this were a story I’d written, her marginalia would include, Was he wearing a ring? If he told you he hadn’t married Janie, why didn’t he tell you who he did marry? Even though he didn’t tell you who he did marry who wasn’t Janie, why wouldn’t that give you married-someone-else-instead vibes? At the very least, she didn’t understand what I was basing my cues on. And indeed I couldn’t articulate them—now or then, when Teddy and I were driving home from Costco and I’d replayed our encounter in my head. It had been years—decades even—since I’d done that level of conversational parsing and analysis, holding every word up to the light and shaking it to see if it had meant something more than what it seemed: a chance encounter with a childhood acquaintance who I used to have a giant crush on. At the time, it hadn’t, but in the days since, my mind, so desperate to avoid reality, swelled with possibility. The possibility that maybe Michael, not the dog, is my true vine.