Tooth and Nail

 "What?"

"What?"

"WHAT!?"

“WHAT DID YOU SAY???!?!”

I looked up from my phone to see my husband's face all red in the cheeks and stern. His arms, locked at the elbows and rigid, were attached to the steering wheel by vice-grip claws. Nails digging in. 

"I asked you six times to tell me why you said 'Oh no' before you just trailed off."

He was driving, and I was reading a message on my phone and trying to do two simultaneous tasks: find the answer to a question posed by one of our kids and then respond. 

I hadn't heard him say 'What' once, let alone over and over again. 

"It's nothing, just the girl asking if I could send her a nail clipper. She forgot to pack it when she went back to school."

"Well, you could have just said so. I thought something was wrong."

My silence, he explained, was as grating as nails on a blackboard.

I guessed he was just Hangry.

It creeps up on him around four o'clock on the weekdays. "Hangry" we call it. It is that confluence of irritation that when mixed with hunger can make a person short-tempered.

I fished a bag of nuts out of my bag and dumped a small pile into his palm. "This will make you feel better.

It worked. For the next 27 minutes, as I tossed nuts and seeds in his direction, and he'd munched enough to level out his blood sugar. He even apologized after we arrived at the track meet and he'd found a parking space.

Still, I wondered if he had enough stamina to hike the four bazillion miles from the parking lot to the vulcanized rings of hell that seems to be built in the center of the sun.

Now HE was dawdling. 

"This way," I said to my husband, churning the air with my hands as if the current it created would drag him in my direction.

He ignored me. Or so I thought.

I saw his brow arch up and his nose twist in the way it does when a person smells something bad. 

I was immediately annoyed.

There was an opening along the fence near the high school track's finish line and soon the boy would be coming in "hot."

I wanted to see the race ending up close, but the man was dawdling.

I raised my hands and shook my head.

He raised his hands and hung his.

Soon he was bent over and combing the grass with his fingers.

And for the forty-fifth time that day, what had seemed so unclear became transparent. He wasn't purposefully ignoring me after all. He had lost something.

"My tooth!" He yelled back with the same exasperation at me for giving him the nuts that could dislodge his dental work … and more than a little relief. "Found it!"

He extended his arm and in his open hand was the proof: A molar-shaped cap.

“Oh my, let me see it.”

“No way! You'll probably send it to the girl with her nail clipper, and I'll never see it again. Besides the starter gun has already gone off. The race will be over soon. And you know what that means ….

No, what?

What?"

"WHAT!?"

"WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?"