By Colton Huelle

One morning, as he was filling up the electric tea kettle, Lev Bradley discovered a khaki-colored tooth in the corner of his kitchen sink. Mistaking it at first for a pebble, he plucked it up with a bemused chuckle. That was when he noticed the few spots of pearly sheen and the distinctly tooth-like dimples on the upper surface. A shock of revulsion shot down Lev’s spine. He flinched and flicked the tooth back into the sink, where it struck a brown diner mug with a shrill ping.

When the initial shock subsided, he peered once more into the sink to confirm what he had seen. It looked somewhat small for a tooth, but what did he know? He retrieved a pair of yellow dish gloves and, steeling himself with a deep breath, once again picked up the tooth.

“Where did you come from, little guy?” he asked it.

His mind, reaching for the nearest answer, conjured an image of his cousin Jane stumbling drunkenly across the kitchen, tripping over shoes that she’d left scattered across the floor, face-planting into the tile, and spitting a bloody tooth into her hand. What next? She goes to the nearby kitchen sink, rinses the tooth and . . . perhaps attempts to re-insert it into the still-bleeding cavity. But obviously that doesn’t work, and so she leaves the tooth, like her dirty dishes and her trash and the whole mess of her life, for Lev to deal with.

Still addressing the tooth, Lev whispered, “what, oh what are we going to do with you?” The tooth had no answer for him, and so he walked down the hall towards Jane’s bedroom.

“Jane!” he shouted, banging his fists on her bedroom door. The door, its latch apparently faulty, cracked open. Not wanting to invade her privacy, Lev pulled the door shut, and this time, held it by the knob as he continued knocking. “Jane, are you okay?”

Behind the closed door, he heard stirring, then groaning, then finally, a raspy voice that answered: “Okay, okay, I’m up. What is it?”

“Jane, are you missing a tooth?” Lev shouted through the door.

“What? No, Lev, I’m not missing a friggin tooth.”

“Well, I just found a tooth in our kitchen sink.”

There followed a silence, in which Lev’s relief that Jane had not seriously injured herself was displaced by the awareness that something far more sinister may have occurred in his home. A tooth, generally speaking, does not materialize out of thin air. If Jane couldn’t account for the tooth’s appearance in the sink, that left only the possibility of an intruder creeping about while he and Jane slept, defiling the kitchen sink, and God knows what else! When Jane still had not answered after a few moments of silence, Lev knocked again.

“Jane, did you hear me?” he hollered. “A tooth—in our kitchen sink!”

“Yeah, that’s weird, Lev,” Jane replied. “I’m gonna go back to sleep now . . . I got a wicked migraine.”

“So . . . you have no idea how—”

“No, I don’t know anything about it. Please, Lev, I’m dying here.”

Okay?” Lev muttered, slowly backing away from Jane’s door.

Lev checked the locks on the front door and each window in the house. All were secure. And yet, an unwelcome guest had certainly made their way into the house. Probably, it had been one of the DoorDash drivers that Jane summoned nightly. Hadn’t he told her just last week about the NHPR story about the syndicate of cat burglars that drove for DoorDash as a pretense for casing houses?

That was the trouble with Jane. Since her arrival a few months earlier, she had not once even seemed to consider playing the part of the gracious house guest. She littered common areas with empty beer cans and Lactaid wrappers. She cleaned precisely nothing. And now, presented with the news that a tooth—a tooth that neither she nor Lev could account for—had appeared in the kitchen sink, she didn’t seem the least bit concerned. Was she a sociopath, or what?

A few months earlier, when Lev had heard through the family grapevine that Jane was down on her luck and facing eviction, he reached out right away to offer up his guest room. The house, which he’d inherited from his mother after her death, was far more space than a fifty-six-year-old bachelor needed. It was downright lonesome, actually. Any company would be a welcome change of pace.

So what if Jane had been a bit cruel to him back in high school? So what if she had once egged him on to ask her best friend Melinda to the Harvest Dance, only for Lev to be laughed at by their entire gym class when he finally worked up the courage to do so. Even Mr. Yakolevich with the warty fingers had laughed at him! Humiliated, Lev had been forced to retreat into the boy’s locker room, where he vomited in one of the shower stalls.

But that was over three decades ago—water off a duck’s back! Two estranged cousins reunited in middle age, leaning on each other, together through life, and so forth. It sounded like a sitcom, and Lev had wholly believed that it would feel like one too. In the days leading up to Jane’s arrival, he made a playlist of his favorite TV theme songs—Full House, Family Matters, Three’s Company—which he listened to on repeat as he cleaned the house and cleared space for her in the kitchen pantry and the medicine cabinet.

His vision of family happiness, cheeky catchphrases, and laugh tracks hadn’t quite panned out. Jane rarely left her bedroom, except to collect her food from the front porch or monopolize the bathroom for upwards of forty-five minutes. And then, there was the matter of her drinking: the falling down, the retching and gagging sounds that filled the house every other night, the ubiquitous odor of stale beer. Within a week of her arrival, Lev had been forced to buy a bigger recycling bin to accommodate her prolific output of aluminum.

He considered staging an intervention, but there was no one to invite—her mom was dead, her dad hadn’t been heard from in forty years or so, her son Cody no longer spoke to her, and her high school friends didn’t seem to be in the picture anymore either. Ultimately, Lev decided that what she really needed was a sense of purpose. Something to occupy her time that didn’t come in a can or bottle. To this end, he tried to include her in various household projects: his hapless attempts at raising zucchini in the backyard, his Sisyphean efforts to patch up the leaky ceiling in the attic. Nothing stuck.

Why, he asked himself (and not for the first time), had he gone to such lengths to show compassion to such a shameless ingrate? But in asking this question, he was simply blowing off steam. The answer was irrefutable. He did what he had done for Jane simply because he could do nothing else. He was, after all these years, still his mother’s son.

Lev’s mother, a teacher at the high school that both he and Jane attended, knew perfectly well how badly and how often her son had suffered at the hands of his cousin. Still and always, she demanded of Lev that he love his cousin absolutely and forgive her trespasses. One summer, Jane’s father skipped town, and, soon after, her mother checked herself into rehab. Lev’s mom didn’t hesitate to take Jane in for the summer, overruling Lev’s objections.

“I don’t care if you forget everything else I’ve ever taught you or break every rule I’ve set,” she told him. “You have to love whoever crosses your path, Levvie—especially those who try to hurt you. Love them fully and selflessly, without tallying debts or fussing over how your love is reciprocated. Do this, and you will become so strong in spirit that nothing can touch you.”

It was a theme that his mother returned into in a hundred or so similar speeches, all of them more or less identical. Sometimes these speeches felt shoe-horned and tedious. More often than not, Lev rolled his eyes in response. Nevertheless (perhaps through simple tyranny of repetition) his mother’s words wormed their way into his soul. Throughout his life, he’d always made it a point to find people—at work, at church, at the diner he frequented daily—who seemed in special need of someone to listen, and he’d listen. He didn’t fuss when the love he showed to others wasn’t returned. The romances of his life, few and fleeting, always seemed to fizzle out after a few months, and when they did, he looked for new ways and new people to love. He volunteered at soup kitchens, lent large sums of money to casual acquaintances in need, and now, he’d opened up his home to his ne’er-do-well cousin when she was down and out.

“Fat load of good it’s done me,” he muttered to himself now, as he sat in the kitchen. All his life, he’d loved and loved and loved. And what had the universe sent back his way? Diddly squat, that’s what! No wife to hold him tight when the world was too mean to bear, as it increasingly seemed to be these days. And even worse, far, far worse: no children to nurture and cherish and admonish to love whoever crossed their paths. His lot in life, it seemed, was to play nursemaid to his sloppy lush of a cousin.

And, apparently, to solve the mystery of this godforsaken tooth. He had to get to the bottom of it; there would be no end to his agitation until he did. The main thing, obviously, was to determine who the tooth might belong to. For this, he would have to consult an expert. If it came to it, he supposed that DNA could be extracted from the specimen and perhaps run through a database of some kind (assuming that its owner had prior run-ins with the law). But this was likely too extraordinary a measure to take as a first step, and so Lev determined that the best course of action was to first consult with a dentist.

#

As Lev was calling various dentist’s offices, explaining his “perplexing conundrum,” Jane lay tossing and turning, at the mercy of a wicked hangover.

At least friggin Lev wasn’t pounding down her door anymore, badgering her about—oh jeez. At the same time that Jane recalled what Lev had told her about finding a tooth in the sink, she realized that she had no memory of the night before and managed to convince herself that the tooth in the sink really was hers. She traced her teeth with her tongue and (thank Christ!) found that they were all present and accounted for, but also? The backs of her teeth were coated with a nasty film. Okay, so she’d yakked. That was one thing, but losing a tooth would have been a new low, even for her.

Although, given what she’d been through in the past twenty-four hours? No doy she’d fallen off the wagon (not that she was super on the wagon before that, but at least she hadn’t been, like, drinking drinking). What was the last thing she remembered? Pizza Hut from DoorDash. Text alert from Bank of America letting her know that she’d overdrawn her account. But what she would have most liked to forget, she of course remembered perfectly well.

For instance: a sudden urge yesterday morning to sort through some of the RubberMaid bins containing junk mementos from the old apartment. She thought that finding a tchotchke or two might give her new bedroom a homey touch, now that it was clear that she’d be here for the long haul. Actually, she hadn’t run that part by Lev yet, but she would, when—

The first item she unearthed from the RubberMaid memory bins was Mr. Wub Me Bear. Picture this: a plastic figurine of a teddy bear, sitting in a green chair, holding a blue balloon that says “WUB ME” in faint white letters. The friggin cutest thing you ever saw? Jane sure thought so, one day in Goodwill thirty-something years ago. She was killing time with her then-best-friend Melinda (what a wicked snob she turned out to be!), having found out earlier that week that she was pregnant. The dad, she was pretty sure, had been that Joe Shmo from a frat party Melinda dragged her to (before Melinda realized she was too fancy to have a friend who wasn’t in college). Who even knew how to get in touch with him? She didn’t even know his name, for crying out loud.

Anyways, when Jane saw the bear, she felt a kind of giddiness at the thought of motherhood, which before had filled her with dread and dread only. So she bought it, and throughout her son Cody’s life, Mr. Wub Me Bear had watched over them from the TV stand. Like a guardian angel, Jane thought. And whenever she’d lose her temper or wonder if she was really cut out to be a mom, she’d just glance over at Mr. Wub Me Bear, and that old maternal giddiness would return to her.

So, yesterday, when she found Mr. Wub Me Bear in the RubberMaid bin in Lev’s basement, she hopped up the basement stairs two at a time and scurried back to her room, suddenly electrified, as if only just remembering that she had a son. Back in her room, she placed the figurine on her windowsill, where she could see it every night before bed, and it would remind her to pray, and she would pray 1) for her son Cody to find happiness and 2) that maybe she could one day be a part of that happiness.

But why one day? The boy still had a mother, didn’t he? And no, she hadn’t always been a perfect mother, but still she was a mother, and any mother is surely a net good in a boy’s life, right? So she worked up the courage to give him a call, something she’d been meaning to do for ages anyways.

“Cody, hon, listen. I’ve been going through it lately, but it’s only made me realize that you mean so much to me. I’m still your mother, you know, and you may be a grown ass man, but a mother’s always gonna worry, and we really—”

“Jesus, slow your roll, Jane,” Cody interrupted.

“Cody, I know things haven’t been great between us for a while, but––”

“What is this about?”

Jane’s thoughts raced and raced, and she couldn’t catch them. Outside her window, those friggin birds that sounded like creepy daytime owls (mourning doves, Lev had corrected her when she complained about them) were at it again. Jane pounded on her window to scare them off. It didn’t work. They kept on cooing. But suddenly a thump on the hardwood floor, and then Mr. Wub Me Bear (having fallen from the windowsill, having lost his poor little head upon impact) lay at her feet, staring up at her with his sad eyes. She gasped.

“Mom?”

“I just wanna do right by you, hon,” she said, bewildered by the sight of Mr. Wub Me Bear’s headless body. 

Cody sighed. A long silence followed. Finally, he said, “I don’t really know what to do with that.”

“Maybe you can just come over for dinner tonight? I’m living with Lev now, in his Ma’s house. You remember your great aunt Doris? She used to babysit you when you were little.”

“If by babysit, you mean you dumped me off with her when you went on weeklong benders. Listen, I don’t want to punish you, Jane. I’ve forgiven you, mostly, or I’ve tried, but I haven’t heard from you in like a year, and, honestly, I’ve been a lot happier that way. I just can’t keep . . . I can’t—”

“No, I get it,” Jane said. And then she hung up.

A year? Surely that wasn’t right. She’d dropped off that Dairy Queen cake for his birthday back in August. So actually? Just over eight months.

Cody had always been a little dramatic. Was she a perfect mother? No, she was not. The trouble was that the Universe had given her the only friggin teenager who wouldn’t appreciate how much freedom she’d given him to make his own mistakes. Basically, she was like those really chill TV moms who told her kids and their friends, “If you’re going to drink, I’d rather you did it here, where I can keep an eye on you.” Granted, sometimes (often) she was the only one drinking. Or doing whatever. Again, she never said she was perfect. But when he was sixteen, the State of New Hampshire, in its infinite friggin wisdom, decided to emancipate him, and he moved in with his girlfriend’s family. And yet, when that little floozy broke up with him a few years later, and he needed a security deposit for his first apartment, guess who sold her brand-new TV to help him out?

But fuck it. She ordered a pizza, crossed the street to buy a fresh case of beer and (for good measure) a few of those piña colada wine coolers she used to pilfer off of her mother way back when, and then—well, after that, all she could say for sure was that she hadn’t lost a tooth.

Now she sat up in bed and winced. Her stomach roiled, and she barely made it to the toilet to yack some more.

What the fuck was this life, she wondered afterwards, resting her forehead on the toilet bowl. She stayed like that for half an hour or more, unable to move without dry heaving. Eventually, she made her way into the living room, collapsed onto the couch, and turned on the tube. Dr. Phil. A white teenage girl calling her white mother the N word. Jane laughed. She should’ve had a kid like that. That’s who she deserved to go through life with. She laughed again before realizing that nothing was funny.

Her phone rang. It was Lev calling, and she sent him to voicemail.

#

“Jane! I’ve just been to the dentist. Turns out, the tooth I found in our sink is a juvenile tooth! What is the world coming to!? These little ruffians, breaking and entering before they even lose their baby teeth . . . the mind reels! I’ve decided though, and this is the main thing, that I will not be pressing charges. No, you know what I’ll do? I’ll take them under my wing . . . like a young ward. Help them with their homework, take them to Fisher Cats games, that sort of thing. Call me back. This is Lev.”

After hanging up, Lev sat in the parking lot of Manchester Family Dental, brimming with joy and wonder. All the while, he stared at the black and white photograph of his mother that he had kept taped to his dashboard since the day of her wake. What a lonely decade had passed since then. Somewhere along the way, he had strayed from the path of unwavering love that she had laid out for him. He’d wandered off into the dark wood of resentment and self-pity and fussing. He’d wasted whole days, infinitely precious days, cursing the Universe for not blessing him with marriage or children, when he should have been on his knees in ecstasy over the smell of flowers and the little ditties that robins sang in his backyard.

But with the news that the tooth had belonged to a child, everything was suddenly clear to him. Here was a child, no older than seven or eight, who had broken into a stranger’s home to steal. And maybe not at all for malicious reasons, but simply because there was no food in their home. If so, then perhaps this was precisely what the Universe had saved him for. Who could say if he’d have had the capacity to reform this little delinquent had he a wife and children to care for? Perhaps it would take a lifetime’s worth of unspent love to do the job, and who besides Lev possessed such a thing?

Lev spent a full thirty minutes, giddy and squirming in the driver’s seat of his station wagon, racing after his thoughts. First, he would instill in the child a love of nature—together, they would hike Mt. Washington, visit the Polar Caves, rent a house on Lake Winnipesaukee, and . . . finally, stepping out of his daydreams, he rolled down his window and took a gluttonous whiff of a nearby lilac bush. And with that, he was ready to drive home and begin his search for the unfortunate little ragamuffin.

A few minutes into his drive, at a stoplight, his gaze landed on a missing cat poster stapled to a telephone pole. Eureka! How better to find the owner of the tooth than to advertise a reward for the missing specimen. He would be Cinderella’s prince and the Tooth Fairy all rolled into one. The light turned green, and the rest of the way home, he drafted the flier in his mind: FOUND: ONE JUVENILE TOOTH. WILL PAY $20 TO RIGHTFUL OWNER. PLEASE CLAIM @ 256 NOTRE DAME AVENUE.

It was a stroke of genius. Rather than setting off on the footing of accuser and accused, Lev would introduce himself as a benefactor, and from there, could go about reforming the child and laying out for them the path of absolute love and virtue. He glanced down at the photo of his mother, silently thanking her for sending him this beacon to return him back to the—he was jolted out of this thought by a horn blaring. It seemed that he had blown through a red light.

When he got home, he sprinted from his car and up the porch steps to the front door, where he struggled with the key (his hands were trembling with giddiness). Finally, he burst into the living room, where he found Jane asleep on the couch and Full House playing on TV. Lev clocked it right away: S4E4, the one where Uncle Joey had to step in as Stephanie’s chaperone for a mother-daughter slumber party. A classic, but he had no time. There was a life to save after all. But first: a glass of water. Sitting in the hot car for so long had turned his mouth to sandpaper.

On the kitchen counter, directly next to the sink, Lev found a purple drawstring bag. He picked it up to inspect it closer; it was made of velvet, gold stitching, and on one side of the bag was a piece of duct tape on which something had been written in a sloppy, curly hand. The letters were faded, but Lev eventually made out the words: Code-Meister’s Baby Teeth.

His brain tossed and turned trying to make sense of it. At first, he understood only that there was to be no young ward. Behind him, in the living room, Jane yawned and stirred. Slowly, Lev turned and walked towards her.

“Jane, what is this?” he asked, holding up the bag.

Jane, who had just sat up and was now rubbing her eyes awake, replied with an unintelligible, guttural noise. Lev tapped his feet while he waited. Finally, Jane shook her head vigorously and looked, glassy-eyed, at the bag in Lev’s hand. A micro-expression of recognition settled onto her face, which did not escape Lev—Jane’s feigned yawn notwithstanding.

“Jane, what is this?” he repeated in the sternest voice that his body had ever produced.

Jane sighed, and reluctantly met Lev’s gaze.

#

It had been years since she’d laid eyes on the tooth bag. But no, that wasn’t right. A sliver of memory returned to her. She had seen the bag yesterday, crammed into the same RubberMaid bin in which she had found Mr. Wub Me Bear. She hadn’t thought anything of it then, but vaguely, in fragments, she remembered stumbling down to the basement a few hours after her phone call with Cody. She remembered fishing the Crown Royal bag out of the RubberMaid bin and kind of tossing the teeth around in her hand like she was rolling dice.

She didn’t remember dumping them down the garbage disposal, but she didn’t have to. It tracked somehow with the chaotic jumble of emotions that she did remember.

She looked up at Lev, whose eyes—hard, and pointed, and dark—reminded her suddenly of her father. Her body clenched and she tucked herself into a ball on the couch. She felt that she would cry if she tried to speak, and so she pulled a corduroy throw pillow over her face.

“Jane?” Lev said after a few moments. His voice had softened, and this was enough for Jane to unclench her body—at least enough to breathe in deeply. She took a few more breaths, and then she felt Lev sink into the couch beside her.

“Jane?” he repeated. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t,” she said and stood up to retreat to her room, fully intending to lock herself in and maybe never come out again. But in her room, she once again saw the headless body of Mr. Wub Me Bear, saw his sad, dopey eyes that seemed to accuse her of something, some crime that she had committed again and again with every breath of her whole life. And then, not knowing herself what she was doing or why, she scooped up the body and head of the bear, and returned to the living room, where Lev still sat on the couch.

“Okay,” she said, sitting beside him on the couch and nodding. “Okay.”

Slowly, in fragments, Jane told Lev all about saving his teeth in the Crown Royal bag and slipping a Hot Wheels car underneath his pillow. She told him about Mr. Wub Me Bear and the phone call with Cody yesterday. How Cody was so smart, smart as a friggin whip, pulled good grades and won an award in middle school for an essay he wrote, something about the justice system. How he wanted to be a lawyer. Such a smart kid. But every happy note had a dark side. Had Jane praised him for his school-smarts? Well. She called him Poindexter sometimes, as a pet name—although, if she was being honest, she hadn’t meant it as praise. More like: she was making fun of him for not wanting to drink a beer with her, just as a for-instance. Anyways, was he a lawyer now, after all that promise? He was not. Couldn’t even finish community college. Now he worked at a window factory, one that she herself had worked at when she was pregnant with him. Geez, that was grim. No doy he blamed her! She was to blame. No two ways around it.

“What were you planning to do with the teeth?” Lev asked.

The question bewildered her. For one thing, she had been so . . . involved in thinking her thoughts that she even forgot that she was speaking them out loud. The sudden fact of Lev’s presence was too much for her.

“I don’t know, I was going to make some kinda craft with them,” she said.

Now she was annoyed. She’d opened up to him, baring her bare-ass soul, and all he had to say was to ask what she was gonna do with the teeth? How about: You did the best you could with him! Or: Only a total ingrate would treat his mother that way. But what business of Lev’s was any of it? He was worse than those sleazeballs at AA, who wouldn’t rest until she admitted that, basically, life was her fault. Whatever, let Lev judge her. Until he was a parent, he could keep his trap shut about her failings as a mother.

“Cufflinks, perhaps?” Lev suggested.

Jane stared dumbly, her mind lagging as she tried to remember what they had been talking about just moments earlier. Cufflinks . . . out of Cody’s teeth. What a dope! Lev, still waiting for a response, was looking at her so seriously, like all she had to do was give him the word and he’d fish the rest of the baby teeth out of the garbage disposal and pull an all-nighter, filing them into cufflinks. In the morning, they would place them gingerly into a velvet jewelry case and drive over to Cody’s apartment, and—it was too much! She was cackling, crying, heaving. “Cufflinks,” she snorted. She was sobbing too, realizing even as she laughed that the damage was done, and that she would never again be “Ma,” but Jane. Just Jane.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Lev move his arm as if to comfort her, but then he pulled it back and pretended to stretch. She inched closer to him to say that it was okay, he could comfort her if he wanted, but he didn’t seem to realize what she meant.

“May I see the bear?” Lev asked.

“Sure,” Jane answered and picked up both pieces from the ottoman on which she had placed them. Lev took them from her and disappeared into the kitchen. Jane watched the end of the episode of Full House. Stephanie was storming out of the slumber party. Uncle Joey was chasing after her. Poor kiddo.

Lev returned a few minutes later, holding the plastic figurine. The bear’s head was glued to the square base, right beside its feet. And on the bear’s shoulders now sat the tooth.

It was a grotesque sight, and the shock of it shook something loose in Jane, as if untangling a knot that she had carried deep in the tissue of her back muscles. She laughed and laughed and laughed.

“He is risen!” said Lev, holding Mr. Wub Me Bear high above his head. He joined Jane on the couch. The Full House title sequence announced the start of a new episode.

---

Colton Huelle is a high school English teacher and fiction writer. His stories have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Passages North, and Cleaver Magazine. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he is at work on his first novel. More of his writing can be found at www.coltonhuelle.com