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"So, um, with all of the excitement on Mammogram Day," Scott says, sounding a little weird and keeping his back to her as he pours coffee, "we kind of forgot something."
"Okay, what?" Dawn asks, still yawning and trying to push back her hair, but there are too many damn wisps. She would love to have hair that would accommodate a sleek bun but even the Robert Palmer girls probably had bedhead at some point. She reaches out for the mug but her fingers curl in horror when she gets a look at her husband's face. "What the hell happened to your face?" she shrieks.
"Shh!" Scott hisses, not very successfully. He sounds kind of like a gas leak rather than a theater shusher. "Max is still sleeping. This happened overnight."
"That's why you kept making those weird moany noises? I couldn't tell if you were farting out that expired lasagne or having a really good dream about fresh lasagne."
Scott's got her mug pressed up against his cheek, humming as the heat of the coffee — the coffee she needs to deal with his face and the morning breath he's sighing out — soothes whatever pain is making him swell up like an overstuffed beanbag.
"Why do you have beanbag face?" she manages. It's the best her uncaffeinated self can do at this point.
"We never scheduled our dentist appointments," Scott slurs, impressively not spilling a drop as Dawn casts her mind back. She meant to schedule their dentist visits as soon as she was back from her mammogram, reasoning that she'd still be able to do it flat on her back while giving her girls a chance to recover from being squeezed like zits; the guy they see never books more than a week ahead but he is super cheap.
"Shit, I'm sorry," she says, cupping his shoulder. "Let me call now."
"His number's disconnected," Scott mumbles. His big brown eyes somehow get even bigger and browner. "Gloria?" It comes out as Gwowia? but she knows what he means.
*
"It's just like hanging wallpaper," Gloria says, laying Listerine strips on Scott's tongue after determining that her mask wasn't enough protection from his eye-watering morning breath. "Or laying brick," she considers, cocking her head at the interlocking pattern she'd made. "Too tender to brush this morning?"
He nods, shamefaced as a little kid, and Dawn squeezes his hand as he confesses, "And last night too."
"Alrighty-roo, let's see what we got." Gloria goes in and even though she's always known how to project her voice, Dawn can barely make out the rant she delivers to Scott's molars. All she hears is good gravy and holy cats and man alive, but those don't add up to anything good. Dawn can't tell if it's coming from her or Scott, but there's sweat making their hands slippery, though she holds on as best as she can.
They get slicker as Gloria keeps working and saying her nonsense phrases; the hum and whirr of the machines, Gloria's voice like a bass guitar, even the syncopation of Scott's desperate hand squeezes — they're all building in her head, like the rhythm of a song. She's supposed to be writing something to debut at Jingle Ball, something truer to them than what that Swedish misogynist churned out after ogling Disney princesses, something better than "I'm Afraid." Maybe this is the first step on the road to that song.
She's nodding her head — Scott's eyes are squinched tight, he'll never see her using his pain to find her vibe — and tapping her foot as she starts to think up a musical line that will go on top of everything she's hearing. Just meandering notes at first, seemingly unconnected until they gain some momentum and then there's a melody making sense of all these external factors. She could see the four of them each chiming on different beats and then their voices swelling together for the main melody, a testament to their reunion and all the shit they've had to deal with along the way. It's poetic, really —
That's when the exam-room door gets flung open. Wickie strides in, dismissing the protests of Laurel, Gloria's receptionist and Laura Ashley superfan and the woman Dawn is guiltily paying to watch Max entertain himself with old copies of Harper's Bazaar and Out. Wickie is in a teal firecracker of a dress and six-inch heels even though it is eight-thirty on a Saturday morning, because of course she is. "Floral, hush," Wickie commands, waving a hand Laurel's way and making a beeline for Dawn, completely ignoring Gloria's double-fisting of shining dental instruments and Scott's flailing on the fully reclined chair. "I woke up this morning with lyrics in my head," she says, eyes shining, "and they stayed in my head because there were no stupid cartoons playing —"
"Max doesn't watch cartoons," Dawn says, and this is exactly why she had to bring Max to Gloria's to listen to his father's agonized yawps, because the day she trusts Wickie to babysit her little guy is never, ever coming.
"Please, we all know who is responsible for cartoon consumption," Wickie says, pivoting to point at Scott, helplessly supine. "We all have baggage. Yours looks like an upended turtle at the moment, hiding what might be a glorious tortoiseshell, but you won't set it down. You're a baggage handler. We are all baggage handlers."
"I thought you shot geese at the airport," Dawn says, trying not to let the image of a chelonian Scott dislodge the melody that might just be coming together.
"Dawn," Wickie says so firmly that even Gloria looks up from Scott's howling maw, "give me a melody." Then she bends in half — her heels are so high the top of her head looks like it could brush the ceiling — to get her face just above the perfect bubble of the spit sink and sings directly into it, running through a few of the riffs in her Rolodex. "Perfect acoustics, Gloria. What is the porosity of this ceramic?"
"Laurel has the supply catalog," Gloria says, cracking her neck and diving back into her work. Scott's moan gives her the first note, and Dawn begins to hum. Wickie takes over, adding her lyrics, and the room is suddenly alive with a brand-new song, sung at a volume that belongs on stage.
*
"I can't believe after all that, we still don't have a Jingle Ball song," Dawn says, shifting just a little to allow Max to lean on her more comfortably.
"The baggage-handler metaphor was an unfortunate dead end," Wickie says philosophically, "but we'll get there. We can try again tomorrow."
That's strangely mature for Wickie, and Dawn smiles down at Max and gives him an extra hug. He said he liked the restaurant recommendations in Out better than the ones in Harper's, and he's got big plans for his next birthday. She plays with his hair and he cuddles in closer.
"We'll start fresh in the morning," Wickie continues, lounging in the chair like that's no big deal despite the corseted dress and heels she's still wearing. "Maybe instead of writing about all the baggage we have to handle from our pasts" — she indicates Scott, who's snoring gently, his forehead pressed to Dawn's other hip — "we should write about all the things we carry inside us." She points to the little vial Dawn's still holding, which contains the extra wisdom tooth that had made Scott's poor face swell up like a balloon. It's got a very sharp pointy fishhook at the end instead of the normal four-pointed tooth-root that's the star of several posters on Gloria's office walls, and it's freaking her out to think that this thing lived inside her husband's mouth for ages; Gloria wanted to study it but handed it over when Scott, slurring his gratitude, asked for it as a keepsake and then promptly passed it to Dawn, who felt like a discount Angelina Jolie from her phase when she wore a vial of Billy Bob's blood as a pendant.
Max jogs her hand and the tooth rattles inside its plastic home, making a sound like a pair of dice. It's enough of a rhythm that Dawn feels the thrill of inspiration run like a lizard up her spine. She remixes the melody she'd come up with earlier, more staccato this time, and Wickie leans in, singing directly into Max's little face. "What's coming out of your mouth, boy," she belts, "ain't nothin' but a cavity / And you have no gravity / What makes you so bad to me —"
"Wait, a cavity can't come out of someone's mouth," Dawn objects.
"Gloria can fill in the dental details later," Wickie says, with that dismissive handwave she'd employed earlier. "Right now, we're on a roll."