Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Evelyn had been Josie’s patient. Years without a problem. She had a dirty mouth, yes, she was a smoker with soft teeth, two dozen fillings, poor gums. But nothing far out of the ordinary. Usually one could sense the troubled patients — they had so many worries, they would jerk around in the chair, grip the armrests, would look at you with resentful eyes before spitting into the sink. Afterward they would ask so many questions, would stay far longer than they should, they would ask for second opinions from her hygienists. Josie had broken up with so many of these patients in the past, sending them to cheaper or more expensive dentists, anywhere.

But Evelyn was one of the good ones. They talked about the creek near Josie’s practice, how Evelyn used to take a canoe through its sulfurous waters as a girl. She occasionally mentioned her dead husband in a lovely way, nothing morbid, knowing he was gone, feeling lucky to have had him so long. She was not angry about anything, had no confrontational bones. She seemed an honest woman. And so why did she come at Josie like she did? Josie sensed forces around her. A son-in-law who was a personal-injury attorney. A niece who had seen some documentary about malpractice. Josie heard things but wasn’t sure. It was a small town, Josie couldn’t know what was true, what happened in her home, in her mind.

She did know that one day Evelyn Sandalwood’s records were subpoenaed from her office. Christy, the receptionist, opened the letter, from an attorney known to be a holy terror, asked Josie about it, and Josie said of course send them, send the records, anything. But she couldn’t breathe. She stared at the letterhead. This attorney was an animal. It was three in the afternoon, she had only one more patient, just a cleaning and checkup. She glanced at the letter, afraid to read it, but saw the words “gross negligence” and “significant delay in diagnosis” and knew her practice would not survive. She let Christy close, and stopped by the grocery store on the way home, getting herself an oversized bottle of prosecco. She got to the parking lot and went back for gin.

Josie should have seen the tumor. That was the claim. In any checkup Josie would do a standard oral cancer screening, and for someone like Evelyn, a smoker, she took her time. She lifted and examined that filthy tongue, the color and texture of a car’s floormat. She remembered vividly doing so, remembered finding nothing, remembered marking negative on her chart.

But sixteen months later Evelyn had Stage 3 cancer and wanted two million dollars. Josie didn’t know who to call. She called Raj. “Come see me after work,” he said. Raj had his own practice in town, and she and Raj talked frequently, gave second opinions on root canals and, for fun, sent each other their most annoying patients. He was a round man in his late fifties with a booming voice, given to dubious philosophizing at high volume. He would stand with his legs firmly planted, as if ready to withstand a sudden gust of wind, and say things like “I love my work, I cannot deny it, because I love all people!” Or, on a less happy day, “The only problem with our profession, Josephine, is the people and their terrible mouths.”

This time, Josie arrived at his office to find him standing in the empty foyer, arms outstretched. But instead of embracing Josie, he began one of his pronouncements. “I told my daughters, ‘Don’t go into medicine!’ ” It was just the two of them but he was talking loudly enough for an open-air political rally. “Can you imagine, an Indian man telling his daughters not to be doctors? It’s these lawsuits! This constant blame. This culture of complaint! We are not the givers of immortality! We are fallible! We are human!” Josie asked him if he’d ever had a patient subpoena anything, and he said sure, back in Pennsylvania once, but he didn’t know a good lawyer in Ohio. She spent the rest of an hour hearing him talk about his own problem patients, the dozen times he’d narrowly avoided lawsuits of his own.

When Josie finally found a lawyer, a young woman who had just left the district attorney’s office in Cincinnati, she knew she was beaten. She’d hired a kid lawyer to defend her against a woman dying of cancer, a woman who happened to resemble Mrs. Claus. She did not stand a chance. It was a matter of settling and for how much.

—

The notion of giving the practice away came to Josie one day when she was arriving at the office. The moment her key turned the lock, the idea struck her with gorgeous simplicity. She would hand the business over to Evelyn Sandalwood. The woman had poisoned the business, and now it could be hers. Her lawyer was hinting at a settlement of two million dollars. Josie’s insurance topped out at one million, and she thought the business could be worth about five hundred thousand, so she offered them a trade. She would hand over the entire thing, the equipment, the clients, everything, and walk away. They could get all that, a million and a half, now, or wait forever for less.

Evelyn’s lawyer said it was ludicrous, no chance, until the former DA explained how long it would take for Evelyn to extricate the same amount from Josie in cash. Her house, even if they sold it, was only half hers, and after the sale and split and taxes and fees it might bring Evelyn one-fifty. The rest would come in wage garnishments for the remainder of Josie’s life — and Josie had made it known she didn’t plan to practice dentistry again, so that level of income was never to return. The business was Evelyn’s to own. That was Josie’s offer. And it was Josie’s idea to give Evelyn’s people seventy-two hours to decide. In those three days Evelyn’s people sent experts through the building, assessing the value of the machines, the lights, the tools. In the middle of it all, Raj called. “I’ll buy it for a million,” he said. Josie told him it wasn’t worth that. “I think it is!” he said — he roared. He was somehow louder over the phone. Josie told him he was a saintly man. “I want happiness for you, Josie!” he yelled. “I want you to forget this ugliness and find serenity! You are now free!”

Even before Evelyn, the work wasn’t fun anymore, wasn’t even tolerable. One day Josie arrived at the office to find a note taped to the door. “How could you?” it asked in a sturdy all-caps hand. The note terrorized her for weeks. Who’d written that? What did it mean? Was it about Jeremy or someone complaining about overbilling? Josie grew skittish. She started to mumble. So afraid to give advice, to impart wisdom that might get someone killed in some lonely Afghani valley, she had begun saying next to nothing. The anxiety of influence! In her country, at this particular deranged moment, a dentist had the power to send a man to his death. A dentist! She had said wildly encouraging things to Jeremy about his ability to change the world, and he was shot dead. Then, she had gone the other direction, marked a box “negative” and that had, Evelyn or her carnivorous family claimed, led to that sick woman’s cancer. Well, enough. It was better to say nothing, to avoid all people. She was done with all mouths, beginning with her own.

“Don’t worry,” Raj said. They were walking through her empty office. Everyone was gone. Raj would soon take over, rehire most of the people. She loved him for it. “Josie,” he said, holding both her hands like they were about to square dance, “the lost will always prey on the competent. Just as someone drowning will pull down someone merely treading water.”

The last meeting with Evelyn and her people — it was an ugly thing. Months had gone by since the first subpoena, and the old woman had lost thirty pounds. She couldn’t talk, and her once kind eyes had grown hard. Josie wanted to feel for her, but felt nothing. She wanted to be gone. Evelyn accepted the terms, took the money, her son-in-law watching her sign the papers with those withered, yellowed fingers.