Excerpt: The Totally True Tales of Tansy Berry, Tooth Fairy

Things about Mandy Bull that annoy me

1.Her hair. She wears it like a football helmet, every brown strand shellacked into place around her head.
2.The fact that she takes the time to enter every single detail of every single file into her blackberry before starting her route. (Although she is new, so she knows none of the background on my clients. And this did buy me some time to slip onto the ferry unnoticed. So I suppose I could cut her some slack on that. But I’m not going to.)
3.She organizes the nightly schedule by bedtimes. I mean, what is the purpose of running from Chicago, IL to Toledo and back, just because a certain little boy’s mother lets him stay up later on weekends? (My route is the upper Midwest, in case you didn’t catch that.)
4.She carries a toothcase. A little pretentious, wouldn’t you say? (Well, you would if you knew what pretentious meant. Which is being a big, fat, show-off,)
5.She takes the time to inspect each tooth with a jeweler’s loupe, a set of ice tongs, and a periodontal probe before paying the child and cataloging the tooth. How is she doing that, with the child sleeping right beside her, ready to awaken at any moment? I’ll tell you.
6.She uses sleeping powder! And memory erasing dust. Regardless of the effects on those poor children the next day.

I could go on, but after watching a half-dozen of her retrievals, I was too disheartened. She treated the whole thing like some kind of cold, impersonal business transaction. And while I suppose you could make a point that that was what it was supposed to be, I disagree. I had a relationship with my clients. I remembered their birthdays. I left them little notes under their pillows, or in the frost on their windows. Okay, so the flowers growing from the carpet had been a bit much, but that had been that client’s last baby tooth. She was growing up, and I wanted her to remember me fondly. Perhaps I could someday be the tooth fairy to her own children.

I peered in through the window, using my night vision goggles, and watched a green glowy Mandy inspect another tooth, give a dissatisfied sniff, and slip a quarter under the pillow. A quarter!

What was this, 1978?

Evidently Mandy believed that by shortchanging the kids, she was teaching them a valuable lesson about dental hygiene. But with all the sleeping powder and memory dust she’d sprinkled, those kids would be lucky to remember what a toothbrush was tomorrow morning.

And a quarter wasn’t going to endear her to them. Not that I cared particularly how they felt about Mandy. But I wanted them to love me. And what she did reflected on me. Because this was my route. And I was going to get it back, whatever it took.

I just had to figure out what whatever was.