Repair

They’ve torn down walls, ripped up floorboards, pulled aside the electrics and beneath all that Carolina pine discovered blackened supporting beams so brittle I can pick off chips with my fingernail, as if someone had roasted marshmallows at an open fire on the bathroom floor, and it’s scorched above the tin ceiling tiles too, so badly the carpenter looks at me like I’ve been running a dog-fighting ring out of my apartment, and in his wince I know this is going to cost, like, there-goes-the-rest-of-it cost, just as, later that summer, it will cost in the dentist’s chair tipped toward the TV where Darlene Rodriguez is talking about the latest MTA accident, a bus this time, which ran out of control and smashed into a building, killing three, including the driver. Something similar happened on 14th Street, my dentist says, peering into the hole he’s made on my back molar, the one supposed to be a cavity but is now a root canal and a crown, and I keep apologizing to him and his friendly assistant with the star tattooed behind her ear, for the embarrassment—six years it’s been, my job, the commuting, but I know why I didn’t go in during that time, I’m thinking of my father cleaning her teeth, more and more yellow even though after she’d eat he’d raise her out of her chair, and carry her like the fullback he once was, lifting her off the ground into the bathroom, slowly brushing her teeth, wiping the spit, drool, the toothpaste with a washcloth, and when I visited I’d stand there helpless before so much love, unable to do anything useful except to watch how serious it gets, how there’s nothing serious without an end, and that’s the only bill you’re ever going to be scared to pay, unthinkable, because once you start paying, there’s no end to what you’ll give, and I witnessed him do it, no bargaining, no installment, just give up everything, his vanity first, then his friendships, and finally his faith. He looked at the blackened circle around her and said if this is how God takes then we don’t have an agreement anymore, while I’m recording the changes in him, so great they just obliterate any self-consciousness, it becomes something you do, like carpentry or dentistry, if you don’t drill this tooth now you’re going to lose it,