My youngest son, Alex lost a tooth yesterday. Maybe it will have been his last. Maybe he’ll lose more. How am I supposed to know? I’m not the dentist.
Exactly two weeks earlier, he had lost another tooth. The upper canine from the other side. He forgot to put it under his pillow, though, and awoke to find the tooth fairy had neither taken the tooth from his bedside table nor left his ransom. We puzzled over it together, and I sent him off to school. This was a Friday (exactly two weeks ago, like I said) and on alternating Fridays, the boys return to their mom’s house after school to begin their week with her. I told their mom what had happened with the tooth and advised her that Alex was bringing a tooth with him and was going to make really sure to put it under his pillow that night and I just wanted her to know, you know, just in case.
So, last night, Alex was extra careful to wrap his tooth in a sandwich bag and make sure it was under his pillow before he went to bed. I didn’t check it myself, but I asked him as I tucked him in and he assured me the tooth was under the pillow. Good job, I told him, and I told him to sleep tight, and I told him I’d see him in the morning, and I turned off the lights on my way out and the floorboards creaked beneath me in the hallway and I felt a little satisfaction at the pretty rug with which Julie and I had recently replaced the hallway carpet we’d torn out to expose these beautiful old wooden floors.
The boys came streaming downstairs this morning at 6:15, a little later than usual. When Alex rounded the corner into the kitchen, we hugged and said our good mornings and I asked him how he had slept and asked him what he wanted for breakfast and asked him one more thing.
“Hey,” I by-the-way’d, “so did the tooth fairy visit?”
Alex’s eyes narrowed as he fixed my eyes in his wickedest of stares. "Don’t you mean, did YOU visit, DAD!“
I was shocked by the accusation. "What?”
His eyes got so narrow, I’d have been hard-pressed to slide a single Y-chromosome through the openings.
“First I heard the floor creak,” he continued, “then I felt my pillow lift up and some hands moving all around underneath, then I heard the bag crinkling, then I heard footsteps leaving the room, and then…”
Julie interrupted. “Alex, are you saying you think Dad is the tooth fairy?”
“Not Dad, exactly,” said Alex, “…parents.”
“Uh huh,” I said, “you got me. I’m it. You think I look busy while you’re awake? You have no idea. You can’t even imagine. Every night, flying from house to house, all over the world. Exhausting!”
“So if you didn’t take the tooth, how do you explain all the stuff I heard, and how do you explain that at Mom’s house last week, when I woke up in the morning, the tooth fairy hadn’t come, and when I went and told Mom, she told me maybe the tooth fairy was running late and that I should go downstairs and play and check back under my pillow a little later, huh? How do you explain that?”
I looked at him, my eyes bugging out, my mouth open so wide you could drive a truck right over my cat-got tongue. He raised his eyebrows to match. There we were.
“Well? How do you explain all that?”
I let my shoulders drop and I exhaled a long, slow coffee-breath.
“How am I supposed to know?” I feigned my best shrug. “I’m not the tooth fairy.”