“I lost a tooth.”
She unrolls her fingers to reveal the white nugget in the center of her palm. With her other hand she pulls down her lower lip to show Mae a hole in the center of her bottom row of teeth.
Mae says, “May I?” When Evangeline nods she picks the tooth up and studies it. It’s so small! How did it possibly do any chewing or biting? “Wow,” she says reverently.
Evangeline nods. “My first one.”
Mae sits up straight, almost throwing Evangeline off of her. “Your first one?” Should Mae get Natalie? What is supposed to happen next? Evangeline nods and then confesses, “All my friends already lost their first ones. I’ve been wiggling it with my tongue.”
“As you should!” says Mae. “The wiggling of a tooth is a rite of passage.” Then she says, “Should we get your mom?” Evangeline considers, then shakes her head. “Are you going to put it under your pillow tonight?” Evangeline shakes her head more vehemently. “Why not?”
“Scared,” she whispers.
“What are you scared of?” Mae hands the tooth back to Evangeline, who puts it down on the coffee table, where it looks evensmaller, like a piece of rice that spilled out of somebody’s take-out container.
“I don’t want a little fairy flying around me.”
Mae thinks about this. She doesn’t blame Evangeline.Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Santa coming down chimneys to bring presents, creatures flitting near pillows while you slumber. What outlandish scenarios we paint for children! It’s a wonder, thinks Mae, that anyone comes out of childhood even remotely sane.
On the other hand, Evangeline has seen some real shit. She’s seen a cow die in childbirth, another from pneumonia. She’s witnessed stillbirths. Evangeline understands that a glass of milk is not just a beverage but a stop on the life-death continuum. With this vast life experience, shouldn’t she be okay with a small money-dropping fairy?
“Did you?” asks Evangeline.
Mae snaps herself back to the conversation. “Did I what?”
“Did you used to like when the Tooth Fairy came?”
Mae squeezes her eyes shut, brings herself to their house on Galway Court, her twin bed with the light pink comforter. She used to have a little heart-shaped cushion with a small pocket on the front of it to hold the tooth. The pillow had belonged first to Jordan and then had been passed down to Natalie, then down again to Mae. By the time Mae started losing teeth, of course, her sisters were all done; Jordan was already in braces, her adult teeth established enough to need straightening, always so far ahead of Mae. “I liked the money, sure. Who doesn’t?” Two dollars was the going rate then. Five for each front tooth. Mae remembers Jordan complaining that she used to get only a dollar and Theresa had said, “Inflation strikes even the fairy world.” She probably had a wink in her voice, but Mae was too young, or simply too much of a believer, to catch it. She had believed so long in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, even the St. Patrick’s Day leprechaun, which should have strained even herstalwart credulity. Her family is right about her. She is too naive. And that’s why she is where she is now—pretty much penniless, quite literally unhoused, and without a plan for how to get back on track.
Evangeline sucks on her bottom lip and says, “Yeah, I guess. I guess the money would be good.”
“What would you buy with it?”
Evangeline thinks about it, really thinks, and then says, “A present for Mommy. A diamond necklace.”
This kid is too good to be true. “Okay!” says Mae, encouragingly. “That’s really nice.” She won’t pop the bubble of Evangeline’s dream with an economics lesson. Instead she asks, “Do you miss your cows when you’re gone, or do you like having a break from the farm?”
“Both.”
“What’s your favorite thing about them?”
“Their eyelashes,” says Evangeline instantly.
“Nice!” says Mae. “Eyelashes. Love it. What about them?”
“They’re long. And pretty. Sometimes they’re blond and sometimes they’re brown but they’re so, so pretty.”
“I’ll have to look more closely next time I visit you.”
The dogs begin to stir. Cinnamon stretches her front legs all the way straight, which is a signal that she’s waking up. Evangeline slides off the couch and gets right down on the floor to pet her. “Shh, you can go back to sleep,” she tells Cinnamon, like a miniature mother, but now Leo is stirring too.
“You’re so good with animals,” Mae tells her. “Do you want to live on a farm when you grow up?”
Evangeline nods and says, “I think I want to be a large-animal vet.”
Mae says, “Like a large person who is also a vet, or a vet for large animals?”
Evangeline giggles. “A vet for large animals.” She tells Mae about the vet who comes to their farm to give vaccinations, help out with births, check on new calves hours into their existence. They call him Dr. George, and he drives a red farm truck. (“Dr. George is superhot,” Natalie once told Mae. “Like, he’d be July in a vet-of-the-month calendar.”)
