Last time I visited Jaime, there hadn’t been a paved road, or a lake, either. His acreage had become trapped in the contagion of resort development that crept steadily, inexorably, across the sand and into the date palm groves. I wondered how close Jaime would let the new stucco walls encroach before he fled. He loved mankind in concept, but not necessarily as neighbors.
Jaime’s weathered adobe and tile house was set well back from the road, still surrounded by a buffer of grapefruit, tangerine, and palm trees. I pulled into the long gravel drive, looking for signs of life in either the house or the attached dental office. I didn’t relish waking him. Especially waking him with the news I had to bear.
When I came through the trees I saw that the rear office lights were on. A round little woman in a white pantsuit stood on the porch steps watching a collie relieve himself on the trunk of a palm tree.
I parked beside a pickup truck and got out. The crisp air was tinged with sweet tangerine blossoms and pungent sage. I took a deep breath and stretched my stiff muscles.
“Forgot your lights,” the woman called.
I reached back into the car and snapped them off. The collie sauntered over, sniffed my hand, nudged my crotch. I must have passed muster, because he stayed close beside me, licking at my hand and trying to get his nose between my legs, all the way across the gravel drive.
The woman came down the porch steps to meet me. “You have an emergency? Otherwise you need an appointment.”
“I only want to speak with Dr. Orozco,” I said. “I’m his sister-in-law.”
“Jaime ain’t married,” she said, widening her stance.
“When he was married, I was his sister-in-law.”
“I know,” she said. “Max called and said you was coming.”
“You know Max?”
“Sure. Don’t you?” She outweighed me by a few stones, and had a lower center of gravity, but I decided that if push came to shove-and at that point, I almost hoped that it would-I had speed and reach on my side.
I tried once more. “May I please see Jaime?”
“Sure”-she shrugged-“why not?”
She led me through a small reception room and into Jaime’s brightly lit examination room.
“What is it, Lupe?” Jaime had his back to the door, bent over a patient in his chair. From behind, he looked wonderful. Tall, slim, firm. There was more gray in his black hair than I expected, and his long ponytail was gone, but overall he wasn’t much changed. In his 501 jeans and cowhide boots, he seemed more natural to the desert environment than the Polo-clad golfers I had seen waiting on the greens for enough daylight to tee off.
The dental chair was enormous and the patient in it very small. From where I stood, I couldn’t see much of him except skinny elbows on the armrests and a stiff thatch of very straight, blue-black hair above Jaime’s hands. Whatever Jaime was doing to him required all of his concentration. I moved into the small room and found a spot between the spit bowl and a magazine rack.
Lupe waited for Jaime to notice me by himself, then gave up and announced, “She’s here.” Then she left.
“Thanks, Lupe.” Jaime glanced over at me. First he registered surprise, then pleasure. “Yep, she really is here. Heard you had a rough night, Maggot, took a pretty good shot.”
“Max talks a lot,” I said. “You’re at it early.”
“It’s grapefruit season. I have to be available before these kids go out to pick in the morning. They won’t give up a day’s wages to see the dentist. Right, Rafael?” He grinned at the boy in his chair, showing off a good number of his own perfect teeth.
“Hey, Rafael,” he said. “You know who this is? An honest-to-God TV star, Miss Margot Eugenie Duchamps MacGowen. You ever heard of her?”
The boy leaned around and took a long, very doubtful look at me. He had a beautiful face, smooth oak-colored skin, huge, liquid brown eyes. It was his mouth, however, that caught my attention; he had a bite like an alligator. His teeth, top and bottom, protruded at such acute angles that his lips wouldn’t close over them.
“You really a TV star?” he said. He sounded as if he had a mouth full of straw.
“Dr. Orozco’s teasing you.” I took out the Dodgers cap I had stuffed in the raincoat pocket and put it on his head. “You have my permission to bite him.”
Rafael laughed and made a few experimental nips at Jaime with his deformed choppers. Jaime picked up a plaster cast of those same teeth and nipped back. Then, manipulating the plaster teeth like a puppet, Jaime said, “Tell your mother we’ll be ready to start putting the bands on your teeth Thursday, the day after Christmas.”
“We’re going south to pick lettuce.”
“You come here before you leave. Promise?”
Rafael’s smile faded.
“If you wait as long to come back as you did this time, your face will grow some more,” Jaime said. “We’ll have to start all over again, make new casts and everything.”
Rafael, looking depressed, unclipped his paper bib and started to rise from the chair. Jaime leaned over him, putting his hands on the child’s shoulders. “What do the kids call you now?”
Rafael said something that I think was Scissors Mouth.
“When your teeth are fixed, they will call you Rafael,” Jaime said.
Rafael turned his soulful eyes on Jaime’s rugged face. “Promise?”
“You bet. Give those braces two years and you’ll be as cute as me.”
Rafael shook his head, smiling his distorted smile. “Cuter.”
“Don’t push it.” Jaime laughed. He gave Rafael a hand out of the chair. “You tell your mother to bring you here before you go south for lettuce. No matter what.”
“I will.”
“Good. Lupe’s cooking chorizo. You better hurry and get some before this TV star goes in and eats it all.”
Clutching the Dodgers hat to his head, Rafael paused to give Jaime a quick, shy hug before he ran to find Lupe.
“You’re such a softy,” I said. “You fix their teeth, fill their bellies, feed their self-esteem. I hope you have a few paying customers.”
“Not enough,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to have ten thousand dollars, would you?”
“Not on me,” I said. “Or anywhere else. I’m paying retail for Casey’s braces.”
“Casey,” he sighed. “God, I haven’t seen her for so long. How is she?”
“She’s fine, Jaime. She’s with her dad for the holidays,” I said. “How are you?”
“How am I?” He went over to the sink and began lathering his hands. “At the moment, I feel old. Ever since Max called last night, I’ve been thinking about Emily, and the old days, the people we knew, the vision we had. I vowed I would always keep the flame alive.
“Max kept talking about old friends, old shit we’d gone through together. I finally had to say to him, ‘Twenty-two years is a long time. Who can remember so far back?’ Yesterday, I probably wrote December twentieth eight or nine times, before I made the connection. How could I forget what that date meant to us? It started me thinking. Time and again, Em and I risked so much, but I think I’ve forgotten that thing that was so damned important to us. Maggie, I think it’s young people who are meant to fight the good fights. And I’m not young anymore.”
“You’re just tired.”
“God bless you.” He smiled. “If I had said all that to Emily, she would have diagnosed some hormonal skip and given me a chemical adjustment. But Maggie, the problem is in my heart. If you put your hand on my chest, you wouldn’t find anything beating in there.”
“Jaime,” I said.
“More proof,” he said, slowly drying his hands in a white towel. “Old men get morose. I’m morose.”
“You’re not old. You’re not morose.”
“What then?” he demanded.