Chapter One from Plant Mom
In the tradition of every modern dentistry known to man, ours played soft rock on a loop. When a 90s one-hit wonder came on the day before Thanksgiving, I couldn’t help but notice how the woman singing sounded as worn out as I was. But she and I weren’t the only ones feeling that way. The limp plant on the reception desk was in desperate need of water, and the turkey banner I’d taped up had fallen. Hopefully none of the moms in the waiting room had looked up from their back issues of Southern Living and noticed it there on the carpet, pitiful and helpless. Perhaps it, too, was overwhelmed by the fact that Thanksgiving was nearly here. In a matter of hours—twenty-seven, but who was counting?—our family was showing up for the big meal. Davis and I had agreed to wait until we knew the sex of the baby before telling anyone we were expecting. It was supposed to have been our big Thanksgiving announcement. Only now, there was nothing for us to announce.
But that was tomorrow’s problem. Today, I had to find a way to rally, to ignore the piercing cramp that still insisted on shooting up my spine from my belly a whole week after the surgery. After all, here was my boss, magnifiers still attached to his glasses from his last extraction of the day. Removing his gloves with a snap, Dr. Lyles said, “I have the twins ready.”
“Great,” I said, straining to sound peppy. The twins didn’t deserve this version of me. They deserved the better Valerie. The happy Valerie. The Valerie they always saw when we shot our videos together. I couldn’t let on just how much I’d been dreading seeing them for the first time since the surgery.
I towed the gear—camera, tripod, ring light—down the hall, swallowing a shriek when I bumped against the bruise I’d earned from my hospital IV. Among the row of reclined kids beneath our hovering hygienists was a gangly six-year-old, his wide-open mouth gapped and spaced from lost teeth. What had he procured with his tooth fairy earnings? Where did his mother keep his baby teeth? Moms always had designated spots for that sort of thing. The bottom of a jewelry box. A sequined coin purse. Even my mom, the least sentimental woman on the face of the earth, had kept mine and Steve’s in the back of her nightstand drawer.
Usually, interacting with more children than adults was the one aspect of working at a pediatric dentistry I actually liked. I relished any chance to open the prize chest for our patients, inviting them to select a candy-colored plastic ring. I’d developed a reputation around the office for calming kids down better than their own mothers could. The trick was hiding the scary, pokey-looking tartar scraper and letting them check out their tiny reflection in the mouth mirror. Most kids only came in for cleanings twice a year, so it wasn’t like I’d really gotten to know any of them. But the twins? The twins were a different story. I’d seen them every Wednesday for the past two years. On their last day of preschool, I was so proud of them that I’d had to excuse myself to the staff restroom to cry. I’d done the same on their first day of kindergarten.
On the door of Exam Room B, the twins had taped the QUIET ON THE SET sign I’d helped them make a few weeks earlier. How far along had Davis and I been then? Fourteen weeks? Fifteen? Now, back at zero, I had to take a steadying breath before opening the door. I prayed they wouldn’t bombard me with hugs today.
Inside the exam room, Sabrina and Ethan were keeping busy on the floor with their coloring books and crayons, sharing a plastic bag of green grapes. They both had on their white coats that matched their grandpa’s, the ones they always wore for our filming days.
“Hey, kids,” I said, immediately busying myself, unfolding the tripod before unzipping the Nikon bag and attaching the lens. I was securing the camera on the top mount when I felt a tug at the end of my scrubs top.
“Can I plug in the light today?” Sabrina asked. Her eyes seemed bigger than usual. More pleading. More adorable. If I looked too long, my hormones would start calling even more shots, flooding my eyes with those same weepy tears that’d been pouring out in sheets all week.
I glanced at Ethan, expecting his typical but-you-got-to-plug-it-in-last-time protest. Lately, for whatever reason, the twins had both been really into plugging things in. “They’re in their electrical outlet era,” Davis had joked when I told him. But Ethan was distracted this time, keeping busy with a green crayon, coloring in the grass in a picture of three dogs having a picnic.
“Okay,” I told Sabrina, handing her the light’s plug. “Hold it by the plastic part, not…”
“Not the metal part,” she said, bounding to the outlet in the corner. “I know.”
I wondered if this was the closest Davis and I would ever get to being parents. Me shooting videos at a pediatric dentistry and teaching children how not to electrocute themselves, then going home to tell Davis about it.
Dr. Lyles shut the exam room door behind him. He set the fake mouth, which our YouTube subscribers called “Mouthy,” on the counter. Its gums were already gunked up with snickerdoodle cookie dough. “Alrighty, kids,” he said. “Let’s get scraping.”
I peered through the camera screen. “Sabrina, honey,” I said, “step closer to your grandpa.”
Sabrina took a big, dramatic step toward Dr. Lyles. I angled the camera to center Mouthy in the shot. On its other side, Ethan was dancing in place.
“Stay still, Ethan,” I said, and he listened, planting both of his light-up-sneakered feet on the floor. I focused the lens, and a sharp cramp shot through me. “Action,” I eked out.
Sabrina passed the scraper to her grandfather, who started in on the sugary dough along Mouthy’s molars. “Go slow,” I reminded Dr. Lyles, so we could catch the details in time-lapse.
As the camera rolled, my phone tempted me from my pocket. I resisted it at first, since there wouldn’t be much of anything there for me now that I’d deleted Instagram. Getting rid of the app had been an attempt to regain control over my own life, deciding I couldn’t handle another targeted ad for a BPA-free bottle set or an organic-cotton burp cloth. The soft pastels alone had been torturous. A life without Instagram, I’d told myself, would be a life free of pregnancy announcements, the price every thirty-two-year-old woman had to pay for merely existing online. Last time, it’d been Krista Stafford, some girl who’d won Prettiest Eyes back in high school, who I, for unclear reasons, still followed online. Her photo had been typical—side-profile, hands cupping her bump—as had the caption: Some personal news! Baby boy will be here in April! Pacifier emoji.
Here was some personal news: Davis and I were never going to have that kind of announcement. Not anymore. Probably not ever. Skull emoji. Coffin emoji. Smiling poop emoji.
And yet I still dug my phone out for one quick peek. There was a text from Steve: yo sis what time is dinner tmrw?
How many times had I told my brother: six o’clock, our place, bring dinner rolls? I couldn’t believe that, on top of everything else we’d been through, Davis and I now had to deal with our families. As if facing one another hadn’t been hard enough. The loss had been hitting each of us in choppy waves, but always at different points, like we were standing very far apart on the same gloomy, wintry beach.
I returned to the camera, watching Dr. Lyles scrape through the remaining dough. We were shooting a week ahead of posting, rolling out the Christmas content right after turkey day, much to our subscribers’ relief. According to the comments, last week’s Brushing Away Cranberry Sauce video had looked too much like blood. My job? Recouping the couple thousand subscribers we’d lost because of it. The channel had to succeed. As long as Dr. Lyles was raking in the extra income from YouTube ads, I wouldn’t have to return to the mind-numbing reality of answering phones full-time. Lyles Smiles Pediatric Dentistry! Valerie speaking!
I refocused the lens as Dr. Lyles accepted the water flosser from Sabrina. She stuck her lower jaw out like a bulldog puppy and turned to growl at her brother. Ethan growled back. They were so bonded. So cute. It made me even dizzier than usual to watch.
My phone buzzed. A text from Davis. Doing ok, love? Wasn’t like us to go almost an entire workday without texting. But before I could sneak a quick reply, Dr. Lyles was finished.
I zoomed in, holding the shot of the mirror against Mouthy’s pristine molars, then punched the red RECORD button with my thumb. “That’s a wrap.”
The twins helped prep Mouthy for our next video while Dr. Lyles checked on patients. I went to grab the boom mic, and when I returned to the exam room, Sabrina had climbed onto the reclining dental chair, using the overhead lamp as a spotlight. She’d broken into song, hands at her sides, giving the chorus of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” her own touch: “Diggin’ the Dancing Spleen!” She cackled at herself.
I sang along. “Diggin’ the Dancing Spleeeeeeeen!” Exhausted as I was, goofing off with the twins reminded me what “normal” could mean.
Ethan started dancing. Sort of. The way he moved was more of a full-body wiggle. Then, he stepped on my toe. Hard.
“Ow!” I yelped, grabbing the tip of my clog where his bony foot had landed.
Ethan’s big brown eyes met mine. He said, “Sorry, Mommy.”
Mommy. The word ripped through me like a cramp.
Ethan self-corrected. “I mean, Valerie!”
Sabrina was laughing, even harder than she had at her own ABBA parody. “Valerie isn’t Mommy,” she said.
Ethan was sucking his thumb. Poor guy. I set my own jabbed feelings aside and knelt to rub his back. “It’s alright,” I said.
Sabrina nudged her brother. “Should we give them to her?”
Ethan’s smile reemerged. I looked between them and asked, “Give me what?”
The twins dug into their pockets, presenting me with folded construction paper. “We made them at school,” Sabrina said. “For you.”
They’d thought of me at school? I unfolded Ethan’s first. It was a hand turkey. Its “feathers,” Ethan’s fingers, were magic-markered in various shades. On the head—Ethan’s thumb, the one he’d just been sucking—he’d drawn a hilariously toothy grin. “I love it,” I said.
“Now open mine,” Sabrina said, and I unfolded her rainbow explosion. Each of her turkey’s feathers was coated in glitter paint. That girl never turned down a chance to sparkle.
Before I could hug them both, Dr. Lyles poked his head in the exam room. “Grab your backpacks, kids,” he said. “Your mother’s here.”
It only stung a little when the twins rushed into the waiting room to see their mom. Dr. Lyles told me, “We’ll have to save the flossing video for after Thanksgiving.”
“I’ll get this one edited over the weekend,” I said, eager for a distraction. A talk with Davis was on the horizon, and not just any talk. It was The Talk. The Talk about our options. The Talk about next steps. The Talk I sure as fuck wasn’t ready to have.
In the waiting room, the twins’ mom, Luna, had an arm wrapped around each of her kids. Her nose swooped at the end just like theirs. Genetics! What a concept. I’d always passed as my parents’ biological daughter, but probably only because I was also white and also not a supermodel.
Luna, on the other hand, could’ve modeled if she wanted to. Her blond waves tumbled against her chic black turtleneck, and when she stood, her long legs were made even longer by her tall ankle boots. An effortlessly gorgeous mom to two perfect kids. I would’ve been lying if I said I wasn’t jealous. It was easy to picture her bookended by the twins in bed, reading a picture book aloud and letting them pore over the illustrations as long as they wanted. She was the kind of parent Davis and I could now only dream of becoming.
When she noticed me, Luna waved. “What’s up, Valerie?”
“Hey,” I said. I stepped to my right, attempting to hide the wilted plant on the reception desk, which appeared to be on its last moment of photosynthesis. I could relate. When Luna first brought us the plant from the gardening shop she owned, its round leaves had been perky and shiny, the exact opposite of the drooping, dull mess they were now.
Luna was pulling a pink card out of her suede bag. “I brought something for you,” she said. “It might help with… that.” She pointed at the plant.
“Oh, god,” I said. “Sorry. I don’t have the greenest thumb.”
“Most people don’t,” she gently said. “It took me a while to learn.”
I accepted the card. Bloom Goods Grow-and-Glow Guide, it read, with a QR code at the bottom. “There’s a bunch of info on my website about the potting mix a peperomia likes,” Luna explained, “and how often to water it.”
“Thanks,” I said, assuming “peperomia” was the name of the plant. Easy enough to remember—its leaves resemble green pepperonis. Or at least they used to. Now, they looked more like the illustrations of cracked nipples in the pregnancy book I’d been reading before the surgery. Said book was now residing in the Little Free Library down the street from our house. When I brought it there, a bright green garter snake had been on the bottom shelf, sunning itself, and I yelped at the sight of it, tossing my book inside and slamming the door. Gotta love Florida.
Now, I flung Luna’s card on my desk beside my gigantic water bottle, knowing I’d never actually pull up the guide on her website. If I’d been coming to work every day with sixty ounces of water in tow and hadn’t given a drop of it to that plant, I wasn’t going to start taking care of it now.
Dr. Lyles walked Luna and the kids out, and back behind the reception desk, I pulled the charts for Monday. And I felt a sudden streak of pride. It was the first day I’d gone since the surgery without any tears. There was a difference between “moving on” and “going on,” I realized. And while I didn’t know what it would take for Davis and me to move on, I was starting to see how our life might go on. Even though the best part of my workday involved pointing a camera at a fake mouth full of cookie dough, my job was steady and stable enough. Not to mention that, every single night, I spooned my dog and was spooned by Davis, as if we were a sandwich and I was the Boar’s Head roast beef. I had a family. My life was full. Full enough.
From the waiting room, a shrill cry crescendoed over our soft-rock playlist. A woman, who didn’t look much older than me, was lifting an infant from a stroller. She patted the baby’s onesied back and pointed at the fish tank. “See the fishies?” Her voice was gooey. “And do I spy a turtle?”
The baby hushed. His doughy, pissed-off face now shone with delight.
I had to look away. After all, how much time had I spent looking forward to being on the mother’s side of that equation? A constant guardian and monitor. Wielder of magic touch.
Now, I just wanted to be the baby.
I wanted permission to wail into the waiting room.
I wanted a nice lady to pat my soft back.
I wanted to lie down for a very long time.
Hurley Winkler is a writer from Jacksonville, FL. She's the editorial assistant at Rose Books, and she writes a newsletter for fellow writers and readers called Lonely Victories. Hurley is currently on submission with her first novel.