“Yeah, that’s right.” Ina adjusted Theodore higher on her shoulder.
“What did he want?”
Ina thought for a minute. “Let me see,” she paused. “He showed up when I was breaking Fella and Templeton apart. I’d left the door open, and he waltzed right in. Isn’t that like the English, always invading something?”
“What did he want?” I repeated before she could travel too far off track.
“I’m getting to that,” she said. “Of course, I’d remember better if Fella and I had a place to sit.”
Mutely, I let her in. She sat on the edge of the velvet sofa and placed Fella, aka, Theodore, next to her. In my peripheral vision, I watched Templeton streak to my bedroom. I wanted to tell her to get on with it, but Ina does everything according to her own sense of timing, so I waited.
“He asked if you were home, and I said no. Then, he asked if I knew where you were, and I said that you do not consult me concerning your schedule.” She bestowed me with a look.
“Is that all? Did he say why he wanted to see me?”
“No, he didn’t. Normally, I would have asked, but I was so worried about Fella here, I didn’t. I thought Fella was a goner, for sure. But you’re made of stronger stuff; aren’t you, boy?”
The cat purred agreement.
“Thank you for telling me, Ina, but I have to be off again . . .” Ina cocked her head at me, not picking up on the obvious hint.
“I don’t think that Templeton and Theodore should be together for a while, so if you could take Theodore back to your apartment, I’d really appreciate it.”
“I see your point.” She rose and hefted Theodore back onto her shoulder. “Where are you off to, in case you get any more surprise visitors?”
I ushered the two to the door. “Tell them, I’m at the dentist.”
If Mains was looking for me, I knew I needed to find out about the engagement picture fast before he figured it out. Dr. Blocken was the next obvious person to talk to, and I was betting that he was at his office. When Olivia and I were kids, that’s where he’d always gone after a fight with his wife. I just hoped that he’d talk to me.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dr. Blocken’s dentist office angled onto the square, a circle of manicured grass and centennial sycamores surrounded by pavement and flat-faced store fronts. The Presbyterian and Lutheran churches indicated east and west, respectively. The square’s real estate is a coveted commodity in Stripling and parking on the square even more so. However, at one-thirty on a summer weekday afternoon, I easily found a space two buildings down from Dr. Blocken’s office, which butted hips with a beauty parlor on the right and a CPA on the left. A tanning salon leased the second floor of his building. Meticulously renovated with Western Reserve airs, the building shone as if it existed at the turn of the twentieth century. A large white wooden tooth declared Dr. Donald Blocken D.D.S. over the main entrance.
A woman smoking a filter cigarette stood under the tooth. Blond, burly, and busty in office casual dress, her head appeared to sit directly on her bosom like a basketball on a lopsided shelf.
The basketball rolled left to right as I approached the door. “Closed.” She took a long drag from her cigarette and added, “Family emergency.”
I felt my shoulders droop.
“If you have some type of dental emergency, all of Dr. B’s patients are being referred to Dr. Keller over on Darcy Avenue.” She spoke with rapid-fire precision like a woman too busy to relish her words. “We don’t take walk-ins anyway. You didn’t have an appointment, did you?”
I shook my head.
“I didn’t think so. I would’ve known.”
“I’m a friend of the Blocken family and was wondering if I could speak to Dr. Blocken on a non-dental matter.”
She picked stray bits of tobacco ash off her tongue. “You’re not a reporter, are you?”
“No.”
“There was one from the
“Olivia.”
She nodded. She looked me up and down, starting at the crown of my head and stopping at the tip of my toes. “What happened to your toe?”
“Cooler fell on it.”
She grunted. “Dr. Blocken’s here. What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. I’m India.” I omitted my last name.
She followed suit. “Nance. I’m Dr. B’s office manager.” She held out her hand. I shook it.
She dropped her cigarette on the walk and crushed it with her flat foot. “Wait here while I tell him.” Nance dug a key out of her hip pocket and unlocked the office door, shutting it behind her. For the next ten minutes, I witnessed downtown Stripling loll through the long July afternoon. A handful of pedestrians shuffled by, and the garden club, grouped on a nearby corner, argued over the cause of the drooping petunias fringing the edges of the square. Some members decried too much water; others claimed not enough.
The door opened, and Nance peeked out. “He’ll see you.”
She led me through a mauve and walnut waiting room and past sterile, white-blue examination rooms to an inner sanctum. Dr. Blocken’s office was much like his home, expensive, tasteful, with artfully-selected décor: conspicuously manly, dark, and intimidating.
Dr. Blocken hunkered at an expansive mahogany desk. My parents would suspect that the wood was stripped from a virgin African forest. The desktop was clear of files, papers, and all the other usual office trappings. Its only decorations were a green-hooded desk lamp, a telephone, and a broken plaster mold of a painful-looking underbite.
Nance’s eyes boggled when she saw the broken mold.
Dr. Blocken looked apologetic. “I dropped Nella Perkins.”
Nance bustled out of the room and returned a minute later with a dustpan and small dust brush.
“Nance,” Dr. Blocken said. “Schedule an appointment with Mrs. Perkins to create a new mold. Sometime next week. Inform her that the visit will be free of charge.”
“Of all the molds to drop. The old bat. She’s a gagger. The last time I fitted her for a mold she spit the compound into my eye. On purpose too.” Nance brushed the last of the mold dust into her pan and marched out of the room.
With Nance and what was left of Nella Perkins’s underbite gone, he invited me to sit. I chose one of the two armchairs flanking the desk. The buttery leather would give my father heart palpitations. The chair nearly swallowed me.
Dr. Blocken, resembling a bear with a particularly tricky pinecone, fumbled with a pen in his hands with ragged fingernails, and I could imagine how the mold had ended up in pieces.
I placed my bag on my lap, using it as a shield. “Thanks for seeing me.”
“Seeing you reminds me of Olivia as a little girl. Back then, it was hard to see one of you without the other,” he said.
I shifted, trying to think how to start. I was facing a broken man who just lost his daughter. My own losses in life were so much smaller by comparison. I didn’t know what to say. How does anyone know what to say at times like these?
I took a deep breath and tried my best. “I’m very sorry for your loss. I want you to know that. Olivia was a good friend, and I’ll miss her.”
“Thank you.” He turned the pen over and over in his hands. His reading glasses slipped further down his nose. He removed them and tossed them onto the desk. They skittered across the glossy surface and came to rest
