The light poking and tapping of the tiny dental tool bring me back to the present.

“Your teeth are starting to crowd. Which means you need braces.”

“But I already had braces. Isn’t once enough?” I look in the mirror again, this time biting and rebiting, baring my teeth like an angry baboon, trying to grasp the fact that there’s a seismic shift—mesial drift—going on inside my mouth, especially in my lower teeth.

“The older you get, the more your teeth move to the front of your mouth,” he explains. “It’s called ‘relapse,’ and if you don’t stop it, it just gets worse.”

“Maybe they don’t want to be alone. Like that final scene in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, remember?” I describe how, after their final broadcast, everyone in the newsroom comes together in a group hug, and then stays in that formation as they scuttle across the floor to answer a ringing telephone. He laughs, and when he does I look at his teeth. “How come yours aren’t relapsing? How come your teeth still look perfect? We’re the same age. I don’t understand why I need braces right now and you don’t. It’s not fair.”

“It’s just luck.” He pokes my lip with the metal pick and I open, and close, one last time.

Passing quickly through anger and denial, I now enter the bargaining phase. “If I decide to do this, can I get the invisible kind of braces, like Tom Cruise?”

He scoots a few inches away on his seat with wheels, snaps off his gloves, and tells me that invisible braces aren’t as good, which means you end up wearing them for twice as long as the regular kind. And, they’re more expensive. “Nothing beats good old-fashioned metal hardware.”

“How long would I have to wear them?”

He tells me that we could probably correct what’s wrong in eighteen months, then scoots back. “It’s not so bad.”

“Easy for you to say. As I recall, you never even had braces once. Unlike the rest of us, you were born with perfect teeth.”

“I could have used some minor correction, probably just a few bands on the front tops and bottoms, but there was a lot going on at home at the time. As you know.”

I watch him move around the office, putting tools away for later cleaning, his back to me. I want to ask him about that time, what it was like, those dark teenage years, but I can tell he’d rather not talk about it, so I don’t. “How much would it cost?”

“Why don’t you set up an actual consultation on your way out today so we can have more time to go over your options and I can answer all your questions.”

“I know. I ask a lot of questions.”

“You should.”

My eyes dart toward the waiting room, where Teddy stares into space at a muted cartoon on a wall-mounted flat-screen television. His teeth are the priority here, not mine.