Free A Song for Mary by Dennis Smith

everything would be a lot different. Mommy wouldn’t have to spend all that time on her hands and knees, and we could go places, and buy things, and Mommy could have time to have a lot of friends.
    Mommy knows that my school grades are not as good as they used to be, and she keeps asking if Sister Stella is spending enough time with me and helping me. She thinks Sister Stella doesn’t pay much attention to me. But I keep telling her that Sister Stella loves all the students because of Saint John Bosco, and she is always being nice to everybody. How do I know if she’s spending enough time with me? She’s always there in the class, anyway.
    All the kids like Sister Stella because she never hits anyone and no one ever gets into trouble in her class. Except for Raymond Rab-bitscabbage, whose real name is Rasakavitch, and who calls things out in the middle of her lessons and then gets sent to stand in the coat closet with the door closed.
    But Sister Stella always hugs him when he comes out.
    The bus stops in front of a building that looks to me like a Con Edison plant, for there are high windows that are wired to keep the crooks out. We go in, the twenty of us, two by two, and sit on long metal benches. Sister Stella is there watching over us, and so it is easy for us and we don’t have to keep absolutely still. Some nuns will clout you good if they catch you talking when you’re supposed to be quiet, but not Sister Stella. If she catches you talking, she just clips you under the chin with her bent finger a couple of times. That makes most of us laugh, and then Sister Stella laughs with us.
    Each of us has a list with the capitals of the countries in South America.
    “Memorize the list,” Sister said to us when we sat, “and we will have a test tomorrow.”
    I start with the first five, Lima, Montevideo, Caracas, BogotÁ, and Rio something. Maybe the dentist will know.
    I am one of the first to be called, and a nurse takes me into a small cubicle. I am told to sit in a large stuffy chair, like the one at Freddy’s, the barber on 58th Street. A young guy comes into the room, wearing a white jacket with two pencils in the handkerchief pocket. He looks a little like crazy Mario, and he is carrying a small pick and a round mirror. He tells me to hold the mirror up so that I can look into my mouth, and he picks at my teeth. He goes right to a tooth that hurts, and I yell. It is up top and way in the back, and my jaw begins to sting. My teeth never hurt like that unless I let cold water go on them.
    “That’s one,” he says as he goes to the next tooth and jabs at it. “Ahh, here’s another. It is the next-door tooth.”
    I yell again as he picks at it.
    Another man comes in. This one is also in a white jacket. He has hairs sticking way out from his nose. The guy steps back and the man looks into my mouth and then reads a paper that the young guy shows him.
    “Okay,” he says, looking at me, and then they both leave.
    In a minute the young guy comes back with a nurse who is carrying a tray of silver tools.
    They give me something to drink, a small paper cup of orange syrup. It makes me a little dizzy, and after a while the nurse comes behind me and holds my shoulders as the young guy shoves a pair of pliers in my mouth. He begins to tug at my tooth, and I can feel the tooth moving. I realize he is pulling my tooth out, and it comes out easily. It hardly hurts at all. He holds the tooth out in front of me so that I can take a good look. And then he throws it in the garbage can.
    As he goes in for the next one I realize that this one hurts the moment he touches it, and I wince and try to shift out from the nurse’s grip. This tooth, though, is like a mule, and it won’t come out, and he pulls so hard I think that my mouth is leaving my body. The nurse’s hands are practically going through the skin of my shoulders as I shake and squirm, and she never loses her grip.
    “Take it easy,” the young guy says, “take it