After the impressions are taken and the cementing phase has started, I’m given a few plastic masks full of nitrous oxide to stop my squirming and complaining, and my constant apologizing about the squirming and complaining. And at some point after that, I start asking Michael questions.

“Bang and Olufsen,” I slur, pulling the headphones off my ears and trying to look at them as they flop against my neck. “Are they from Sweden?”

“Denmark,” he says through his blue paper mask.

I don’t buy it. “I think they’re from Häagen-Dazs.”

Another question: “How old are your kids?”

“Eleven, nine, and seven.”

My eyes fill with tears. “I remember eleven, nine, and seven,” I whisper. “Teddy still liked me then.”

Then the real question: “So why did you get divorced?”

Michael’s brow tenses over his mask. “What makes you think I’m divorced?”

“It’s obvious,” I slur, trying to point with my floppy hands, at the walls and at him. “There’s no Janie in the photos, and you don’t wear a ring.”

“You’re a real Columbo.”

I nod, then point to my brain, smugly. “I’m a writer. It’s my job to notice this stuff.” I let a few moments pass, then I ask again. “Seriously.”

“Seriously what?”

“Seriously why did you and Janie get divorced?”

“Oh Judy,” he says, smiling, with the tiny pliers still in my mouth. “Wasn’t it enough that you wrecked my Passover diorama?”

I laugh, and close my eyes. I’m floating in the chair, my head a swirl of cotton candy. “Then let me ask you this,” I say, forcing my eyes open again. “How did you both know you were making the right decision? When did you go from thinking maybe splitting up was the right thing to do, to knowing it was? My husband and I are separated but we still live together, and there’s a weird kind of shame about not being brave enough to leave.”

“Judy.”

“Yes, Michael.”

“I didn’t marry Janie. I married her brother. And we’re still together. Very happily so.”

* * *

I drive home with my mouth closed over teeth already hurting from being pushed and pulled, reluctant participants in the drama and chaos that I’m trying to control. I’m deep in the black hole of shame for how badly I misread the situation with Michael, thinking he might be my vine, my way forward, the perfect ending to my sad story. Isn’t this what would happen in the movie version of a person who moves back to their hometown? Wouldn’t this have been the perfect plot point?

I suddenly wish I’d kept some of my mother’s OxyContin to dull the tooth pain and erase the humiliation and disappointment of the death of a tiny fantasy. Just a few pills, or a handful of pills; maybe just one container from the drugstore, that giant-size refill she was getting at the end, which wasn’t enough and required the addition of a fentanyl patch. How easy it would have been to slip a few pills into my pockets at the end, in hospice, when they sat unused in the overnight bag my father and I had brought for her, because there was no time to wait for pills to work when liquid morphine under the tongue was so much faster and didn’t require swallowing. For five days we moved that bag, full of other things we didn’t use—Enya CDs, slippers, hand cream, a bathrobe—from chair to closet to chair again—packed because I’d glanced at a few end-of-life websites and taken the advice of the home hospice nurse to bring nightclothes and soft sweatpants and socks; family photos to put around her temporary room; things to remind her of home, of her happy life, to make the phase of active dying—her transition—her passing—easier. To make it easier for her to let go.