by Julia F. Green

The tooth had been in her purse for years, since the day it fell out at a birthday party for one of Evan’s friends and he shoved it into his mother’s hand and ran back to the other children, delirious to be playing together after a long year home alone. She dropped the tooth into her purse, basked in the smiling faces around her, the joy of seeing noses and mouths.

After the party she put the tooth on his nightstand. At bedtime he squeezed it in his fist then released it to the safe space beneath his pillow. At dawn, she slid a dollar under his head, squeezing the tooth in her own fist as she admired his limbs splashed across the bed, his mouth open and sighing, his eyeballs moving slightly under their lids, the beauty of this sight justifying every single thing she had postponed or canceled since the day he was born.

The day Evan started his sophomore year of high school, she was at the DMV rooting around in her purse for a pen when she came upon the tooth, rock hard and slightly yellowed. He was dating somebody, she thought, a fair-haired boy who came to their house from time to time and looked at Evan in a way she recognized, the way she had first looked at her husband when they’d met in college, the way she’d looked at Evan in his early years—astonishment that this thing was hers, close at hand, eager to be held and touched and loved. She didn’t ask Evan about the boy.

She didn’t ask Evan anything. She just washed his foul-smelling clothes and watched him eat four pieces of chicken for dinner, down glasses of milk, shoot up to a size that made it seem impossible that tiny tooth was ever in his mouth.

When they dropped him off at college, she was digging for a packet of tissues when she found the tooth once more. She considered having it made into a necklace or brooch. She could find some clever artist, a mother like herself, who would not blink when she said that sometimes, when the house was empty, she lay on Evan’s bed with the tooth in the palm of her hand, remembering the entwinement of their bodies, the spit, sweat, and tears that once mixed freely.

She didn’t need the tooth, but she would carry it always. One day, hopefully when Evan was much older than she was now, she would die. When they turned over her purse, after the glasses and cough drops and stray receipts, it would fall out, the sweet, gleaming piece of him she could never part with.