The Molar Majority

Chapter 1: The System

The toupee arrived before the man.

It crested the doorframe of the back hallway like a small mammal emerging from hibernation—brown, slightly lopsided, optimistic in a way that defied the evidence. Beneath it, eventually, appeared the face of Dr. Don Kober: sixty-two years old, five foot nine in his dental clogs, wearing a lab coat with his name embroidered in a font that could only be described as "hopeful cursive."

"You're the girl," he said.

"I'm a girl," said Janie Krull, who was sitting in the waiting room on a chair upholstered in mauve vinyl that had absorbed decades of nervous perspiration. "I don't know if I'm the girl."

"You answered the ad."

"I did."

"In the Gazette."

"Yes."

"The classified section."

"That's where the ads are, yes."

Dr. Kober studied her. He had the look of a man who had once been handsome and had never fully recovered from the betrayal of time. His jaw was strong. His eyes were the pale blue of a swimming pool no one maintained anymore. The toupee—which he would later introduce to her as "the System"—sat on his head at an angle suggesting it had been applied during a minor earthquake.

"Can you answer a phone?" he asked.

"I can."

"Can you answer a phone pleasantly?"

Janie considered this. She had spent the last nineteen years in Benton Corners, Iowa, a town of four thousand people who all knew each other's dental histories, marital failures, and opinions about corn subsidies. She had graduated high school fourteen months ago with a GPA that her guidance counselor had described as "adequate" and a future he had described as "pending." She had spent the subsequent year working part-time at the Benton Corners Public Library, shelving books and avoiding her mother.

Her mother, Marla Krull, was a thrice-divorced amateur playwright who was currently workshopping a musical about the Lindbergh baby. The musical was called "Wings of Sorrow," and it featured a tap number called "Where's the Infant?" that Marla performed in the living room every evening at seven-fifteen, wearing character shoes and an expression of artistic torment.

Marla insisted Janie was "wasting her prime."

Janie felt strongly that the phrase "wasting your prime" should not be used by anyone who had choreographed a dance routine about a kidnapped toddler.

"I can answer a phone pleasantly," Janie said.

"Good," said Dr. Kober. "You're hired."

"Don't you want to see my résumé?"

"Do you have one?"

"No."

"Then I don't want to see it. Come on. I'll show you the operation."

The operation, as Dr. Kober called it, occupied the ground floor of a two-story brick building on the east side of Benton Corners' town square. The building had been constructed in 1923 and renovated never. The waiting room had wood paneling the color of instant coffee. The carpet was a deep teal that had probably been fashionable once, during a decade Janie preferred not to think about. There were two dental chairs, a sterilization area, a supply closet, and a front desk with a rotary telephone, a desktop calendar from 2019, and a ceramic mug that said WORLD'S BEST DENTIST in letters that were chipping off, so it now read WORL'S B ST DENT ST.

Behind the front desk, a fish tank glowed with the sickly green luminescence of neglected aquarium water. In it, a single goldfish hung motionless, staring outward with an expression of pure, concentrated malice.

"That's Reagan," said Dr. Kober.

"After the president?"

"After my second wife's cat. The cat died in '94. The fish has outlived everything I've ever loved." He tapped the glass. Reagan did not move. "I think he feeds on spite."

Janie looked at the fish. The fish looked at Janie. She felt, distinctly, that she had been assessed and found wanting.

"I'll show you the filing system," said Kober.

The filing system was a floor-to-ceiling cabinet in the hallway that smelled faintly of mint and despair. Patient records were organized in manila folders arranged by a method that Janie would later determine was "roughly alphabetical, with significant exceptions based on personal grudges." The Hendersons were filed under M, because Dr. Kober didn't care for them. A man named Phil Waverly had his own drawer, for reasons no one would explain.

"And this," said Kober, pushing open the supply closet door, "is where Bev lives."

A cloud of cigarette smoke billowed outward like the breath of a dragon who had given up on terrorizing villagers and settled for terrorizing coworkers. Through the haze, Janie made out a woman in her late fifties sitting on an upturned bucket, wearing scrubs printed with cartoon teeth and holding a Virginia Slim with the casual authority of a woman who had been told to quit smoking by every dentist she'd ever worked for and had decided, on principle, to outlive them all.

"Bev Danner," said the woman, not standing. "Hygienist. Thirty-one years."

"Janie Krull. Receptionist. Four minutes."

Bev exhaled smoke through her nostrils and studied Janie with the penetrating gaze of someone who knew things. Janie would later learn that this was not an affectation. Bev Danner knew everything about everyone in Benton Corners. She knew who was sleeping with whom, who owed money to whom, who had lied on their insurance forms, and who had wept in the dental chair. She collected secrets the way other people collected stamps—methodically, comprehensively, and with a cataloguing system that put the filing cabinet to shame.

"Krull," Bev said. "Marla's daughter?"

"Unfortunately."

Bev's eyes narrowed, then softened. "You'll do," she said, and took another drag.

Janie loved it instantly.

She loved the rotary phone that took four seconds to dial each number. She loved the appointment cards, physical cards, made of actual card stock, that she wrote on with an actual pen. She loved the way the afternoon light came through the front window and made the waiting room look almost dignified, if you squinted and ignored the carpet. She loved that she had a desk, and a phone voice, and a reason to say "I'm sorry, I can't, I have work" when Marla called to ask if she could help build a papier-mâché airplane for the second act of "Wings of Sorrow."

For the first time in her life, Janie Krull had a place to be.

The place was falling apart, but it was hers.

On her third day, she learned about SmileCorp.

She learned about it because the waiting room was empty. It had been empty on her first day, too, and her second. On her third day, she asked Bev why.

"Look across the square," Bev said.

Janie looked.

Across the town square, where the old hardware store used to be, a building gleamed. It gleamed in a way that buildings in Benton Corners did not gleam. It gleamed with purpose. Its windows were floor-to-ceiling glass. Its sign was backlit in a shade of blue that dentists apparently believed conveyed trustworthiness but that Janie found vaguely threatening. The sign read:

SMILECORP
YOUR SMILE JOURNEY STARTS HERE

"They opened fourteen months ago," Bev said. "Right about when you graduated. Coincidence? Yes. But still."

"How bad is it?"

"We used to have three hundred active patients. We're down to eighty-six, and fourteen of those are dead. Don just hasn't updated the files."

"Why not?"

"Because he says they might come back. He's an optimist about everything except his marriages."

Janie looked back at SmileCorp. Through the glass, she could see a waiting room that looked like a spa. There were potted plants. There was a beverage station. There were multiple dentists, all of whom appeared to have been manufactured in the same facility: tall, white-coated, aggressively symmetrical, with teeth so white they seemed to emit their own light source.

"Who runs it?" Janie asked.

"Dr. Chad Brammer."

From the back hallway, Dr. Kober's voice boomed: "Do NOT say that name in this office!"

Bev lit a cigarette. "Dr. Chad Brammer," she repeated, louder. "Kober trained him. Residency year, 2005. Brammer left, went corporate, came back with money and veneers and a business plan. Don calls him—"

"Judas with veneers!" Kober shouted from the back.

"—Judas with veneers," Bev confirmed.

Janie looked at SmileCorp. She looked at Kober Dental. She looked at Reagan, who glared at her from his tank with the unblinking contempt of a creature who had watched civilizations rise and fall and found them all lacking.

"So we're in trouble," Janie said.

"Honey," said Bev, "we were in trouble before you were born. Now we're in trouble with a deadline."

The deadline arrived on Janie's fourth day, in the form of Gary Utz.

Gary Utz was the building's landlord. He was a small man with small glasses and small hands and a small mouth that produced words of enormous, penny-pinching precision. He wore short-sleeve dress shirts year-round and carried a briefcase that contained, as far as Janie could tell, nothing but a calculator and a Ziploc bag of reused staples, which he called "fiscal discipline."

"Don," said Gary Utz, standing in the waiting room with his briefcase clutched to his chest like a shield. "We need to talk about the rent."

"We don't," said Kober, who had emerged from the back wearing the System at a particularly jaunty angle, suggesting he had been napping.

"You're six months behind."

"I'm aware."

"Six months, Don. That's half a year."

"Thank you, Gary. I went to dental school, not math school, but I can handle that one."

Gary Utz opened his briefcase, removed the calculator, and pressed several buttons with the deliberate care of a man defusing a bomb. "Fourteen thousand, four hundred dollars," he said. "That's what you owe."

"And I'll pay it."

"When?"

"Soon."

"How soon?"

"Soonish."

Gary Utz closed his briefcase with a click that sounded, to Janie, like a guillotine. "Ninety days, Don. You have ninety days to pay in full, or I'm leasing this space to someone who can."

"And who would that be, Gary? Who else wants a ground-floor space with original wood paneling and a fish tank that smells like the ocean's armpit?"

Gary Utz looked at Kober. Then he looked across the square, toward SmileCorp's gleaming facade.

He didn't say anything.

He didn't have to.

After Gary left, Kober stood in the waiting room for a long time, staring at nothing. The System had shifted slightly, giving him the look of a man whose head was trying to escape from under a small animal.

"Ninety days," he said quietly.

Janie looked at the empty waiting room. She looked at the rotary phone that hadn't rung all morning. She looked at Reagan, who was doing his daily impression of a creature plotting the downfall of everyone within a six-foot radius.

She had never had a purpose. She had never saved anything. She had spent nineteen years avoiding things—avoiding Marla's theater friends, avoiding the question of what she was going to do with her life, avoiding the slow gravitational pull of becoming someone who just stayed in Benton Corners and never quite figured out why.

But she had a desk now. She had a phone voice. She had an office that smelled like mint and despair, and a boss whose toupee was held on by optimism, and a hygienist who smoked in the supply closet and knew everyone's secrets.

She was not going to let this place die.

"Dr. Kober," she said.

"What."

"I have some ideas."

Kober looked at her. His pale blue eyes were tired, and sad, and a little bit scared, and she realized with a start that beneath the bravado and the System and the theatrical declarations about corporate dentistry, he was just a man who didn't want to lose the only thing he had left.

"Ideas," he said.

"Ideas," she said.

"Lord help us," said Bev from the supply closet.

Reagan blew a single, contemptuous bubble.

Janie Krull squared her shoulders, picked up the rotary phone, and began to dial.