It never fails. I open my mouth and I wind up in hot water. But in this case the circumstances were special. After all, I was only following orders.

“Open, Bern. A little wider, huh? That’s right. That’s fine. Perfect. Just beautiful.”

Beautiful? Well, they tell me it’s in the eye of the beholder and I guess they’re right. If Craig Sheldrake wanted to believe there was beauty in a gaping mouthful of teeth, that was his privilege and more power to him. They weren’t the worst teeth in the world, I don’t suppose. Twenty-some years ago a grinning orthodontist had wired them with braces, enabling me to shoot those little rubber bands at my classmates, so at least they were straight. And since I’d given up smoking and switched to one of those whiter-than-white toothpastes, I looked somewhat less like a supporting player in The Curse of the Yellow Fangs. But all of the molars and bicuspids sported fillings, and one of the wisdom teeth was but a memory, and I’d had a wee bit of root-canal work on the upper left canine. They were respectable teeth for one as long in the tooth as I, perhaps, and they’d given me relatively little trouble over the years, but it would be an exaggeration to call them either a thing of beauty or a joy forever.

A stainless-steel probe touched a nerve. I twitched a little and made the sort of sound of which one is capable when one’s mouth is full of fingers. The probe, relentless, touched the nerve again.

“You feel that?”

“Urg.”

“Little cavity, Bern. Nothing serious but we’ll tend to it right now. That’s the importance of coming in for a cleaning three or four times a year. You come in, we shoot a quick set of X-rays just as a routine measure, we have a look around, poke the old molars a bit, and we catch those little cavities before they can grow up into big cavities. Am I right or am I right, keed?”