Chapter 4 - A New Chapter
We brought the blue box home.
That night, I sat beside Emma on her bed.
I placed the envelopes in front of her.
“These are yours.”
She touched one.
“Even the ugly ones?”
My heart shattered all over again.
“None of them are ugly.”
She studied my expression.
“Grandma said people notice your teeth first.”
“Some people notice teeth. Some notice hair. Some notice shoes. But nobody has the right to hurt you because they dislike how something looks.”
She nodded, then she reached inside her pajama pocket.
She still had the tooth she’d hidden.
“Can the Tooth Fairy take this one?”
“Only if you want her to.”
“What about those?”
She glanced at the envelopes.
“Those don’t need to go anywhere.”
That seemed to surprise her.
“They can stay?”
“They belong to you.”
Emma smiled.
Just a little.
It was the first time since I’d gotten home that she hadn’t immediately covered her mouth.
Over the following few weeks, we had several dentist appointments.
Emma’s gums healed.
The dentist reassured us that her permanent teeth should grow normally, although we’d need to keep monitoring them.
The harder part was helping Emma smile again.
For a while, whenever I raised my phone, her lips immediately closed.
So I stopped telling her to smile.
If she wanted a photo, we took one.
If she didn’t, we didn’t.
Mark did the same.
Diane called.
Then she texted.
Then she sent a lengthy email explaining that she’d been raised to believe appearances mattered and that everything she’d done had come from love.
Mark answered with one sentence.
“Love doesn’t make a child’s ‘no’ disappear.”
After that, we quit arguing with her.
There was nothing more to argue about.
Three months later, Emma came racing into the kitchen holding something between two fingers.
“Mom!”
I turned around.
She was grinning.
There was another space in her mouth.
My heart jumped before I could stop it.
“What happened?”
“It fell out!”
She was laughing.
“All by itself!”
She held up the tiny tooth like she’d just won a trophy.
Mark walked in from the living room.
“What happened?”
Emma spun toward him.
“Look!”
She opened her mouth as wide as possible.
Mark looked at me.
Neither of us spoke for a second.
Then he smiled.
“That is one impressive gap.”
Emma laughed.
“Take a picture!”
So I did.
She stood in the center of the kitchen in mismatched socks, hair half falling from its ponytail, holding her tiny tooth beside her face.
And she smiled so widely I could see every crooked tooth and every space between them.
That night, Emma placed the tooth under her pillow.
The others remained in the blue box inside her closet because Emma wanted to keep them.
They belonged to her.
A few weeks later, I printed the photograph from that night and placed it inside a frame.
Emma decided where it went.
Right in the living room.
The first thing you see when you enter our front door is my daughter with messy hair, one missing tooth, and the biggest smile across her face.
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For a while, I believed the worst thing Diane had done was remove teeth that weren’t ready to come out.
It wasn’t.
The worst thing was teaching a little girl that another person’s idea of pretty mattered more than her right to say no.
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The teeth would grow back.
That lesson was what we had to pull out by the root.
