Where I'm Calling From

see?” I looked at where she was looking. There was a slender red vase into which somebody had stuck a few garden daisies. Next to the vase, on the doily, sat an old plaster-of-Paris cast of the most crooked, jaggedy teeth in the world.
    There were no lips to the awful-looking thing, and no jaw either, just these old plaster teeth packed into something that resembled thick yellow gums.
    Just then Olla came back with a can of mixed nuts and a bottle of root beer. She had her apron off now.
    She put the can of nuts onto the coffee table next to the swan. She said, “Help yourselves. Bud’s getting your drinks.” Olla’s face came on red again as she said this. She sat down in an old cane rocking chair and set it in motion. She drank from her root
    beer and looked at the TV. Bud came back carrying a little wooden tray with Fran’s glass of whiskey and water and my bottle of ale. He had a bottle of ale on the tray for himself.
    “You want a glass?” he asked me.
    I shook my head. He tapped me on the knee and turned to Fran.
    She took her glass from Bud and said, “Thanks.” Her eyes went to the teeth again. Bud saw where she was looking. The cars screamed around the track. I took the ale and gave my attention to the screen. The teeth were none of my business. “Them’s what Olla’s teeth looked like before she had her braces put on,”
    Bud said to Fran. “I’ve got used to them. But I guess they look funny up there. For the life of me, I don’t know why she keeps them around.” He looked over at Olla. Then he looked at me and winked. He sat down in his La-Z-Boy and crossed one leg over the other. He drank from his ale and gazed at Olla.
    Olla turned red once more. She was holding her bottle of root beer. She took a drink of it. Then she said,
    “They’re to remind me how much I owe Bud.”
    “What was that?” Fran said. She was picking through the can of nuts, helping herself to the cashews.
    Fran stopped what she was doing and looked at Olla. “Sorry, but I missed that.” Fran stared at the woman and waited for whatever thing it was she’d say next.
    Olla’s face turned red again. “I’ve got lots of things to be thankful for,” she said. “That’s one of the things I’m thankful for. I keep them around to remind me how much I owe Bud.” She drank from her root beer.
    Then she lowered the bottle and said, “You’ve got pretty teeth, Fran. I noticed right away. But these teeth of mine, they came in crooked when I was a kid.” With her fingernail, she tapped a couple of her front teeth. She said, “My folks couldn’t afford to fix teeth. These teeth of mine came in just any which way.
    My first husband didn’t care what I looked like. No, he didn’t! He didn’t care about anything except where his next drink was coming from. He had one friend only in this world, and that was his bottle.”
    She shook her head. “Then Bud come along and got me out of that mess. After we were together, the first thing Bud said was, ‘We’re going to have them teeth fixed.’ That mold was made right after Bud and I met, on the occasion of my second visit to the orthodontist. Right before the braces went on.”
    Olla’s face stayed red. She looked at the picture on the screen. She drank from her root beer and didn’t seem to have any more to say.
    “That orthodontist must have been a whiz,” Fran said. She looked back at the horror-show teeth on top of the TV.
    “He was great,” Olla said. She turned in her chair and said, “See?” She opened her mouth and showed us her teeth once more, not a bit shy now.
    Bud had gone to the TV and picked up the teeth. He walked over to Olla and held them up against Olla’s cheek. “Before and after,” Bud said.
    Olla reached up and took the mold from Bud. “You know something? That orthodontist wanted to keep this.” She was holding it in her lap while she talked. “I said nothing doing. I pointed out to him they were my teeth. So he took pictures of the mold instead. He told me he was going to put the pictures in a magazine.”
    Bud said, “Imagine what kind of magazine that’d be. Not much call for that kind of publication, I don’t think,” he said, and we all laughed.
    “After I got the braces off, I kept putting my hand up to my mouth when I laughed. Like this,” she said.
    “Sometimes I still do it. Habit. One day Bud said, ‘You can stop doing that anytime, Olla. You don’t have to hide teeth as pretty as that. You have nice teeth