Nine Inches

One-Four-Five

IN THE TURBULENT, LONELY MONTHS that followed the collapse of his marriage, Dr. Rick Sims became obsessed with the blues. It started simply enough; he was driving home from work, half-listening to one of the classic-rock stations preset into the SiriusXM unit on the Audi A4 he was pretty sure he could no longer afford, when a song snagged his attention — “Born Under a Bad Sign,” not the original and far superior Albert King version that he would later come to love, but the white-bread cover by Cream. Its main riff sliced through the fog of his guilt and shame, a simple, plodding phrase that repeated itself with slight variations throughout the song:

Hey, he thought, though he hadn’t picked up a guitar in years. I bet I could play that.

When he got home — home being the grim condo he’d rented after Jackie had evicted him from their comfortable, five-bedroom house on Finnamore Drive — he unearthed his old Yamaha acoustic from its dusty case, tuned it as best he could, and started fooling around on the low strings, trying to re-create the riff from memory. Something wasn’t right, so he turned to the Web for assistance, discovering a treasure trove of helpful links: tablature sites, free lessons on YouTube, and a vast archive of live-performance videos, not just King and Clapton and Hendrix tearing it up, but a bunch of random dudes playing along with the record in their bedroom or basement. Some of these amateurs were dishearteningly good, but others could barely play a note. It was like some weird form of masochism, the way they flaunted their ineptitude, inviting the cruelty of anonymous commentators:

Sims hated to admit it, but he took a shameful pleasure in the abuse, watching the poor saps take their punishment. Better you than me, brother. It was a tough world out there, and you were a fool to reveal your weakness. He wondered if maybe these losers were so desperate for human contact that insults from total strangers seemed like a step in the right direction, an upgrade from complete invisibility. In any case, it was oddly encouraging to see the whole spectrum of human talent laid out like that, to discover that, even now, rusty as he was, he was nowhere near being the worst guitar player in the world.

It was after ten o’clock when he closed the laptop and stowed away the Yamaha, which meant that he’d been working on that one simple song for almost three hours. His fingertips hurt and his mind was buzzing, but it was a healthy change of pace, doing something constructive instead of pining for his kids, or dozing off in front of some lame TV show, or masturbating to obscure fetish porn that made him feel dirty and hollow when he was finished. He ate a sandwich, watched the news for a bit, and then went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Sims usually had trouble sleeping in the condo — the mattress was too soft, and he could hear the traffic on Route 27 — but that night he drifted off right away, a weary blues riff echoing in his head like a lullaby.

JUST A few weeks earlier, Sims had been an enviable man, a proverbial pillar of the community — husband, father, homeowner, soccer coach, churchgoer, Audi driver, pediatrician. And now he was something else — an outcast, an adulterer, an absentee dad, the costar of a sordid workplace scandal. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d devoted his entire life to constructing the first identity; it had been erased overnight, on account of a single, inexplicable transgression. He wanted to say it wasn’t fair, but he’d stopped believing in fairness a long time ago. As far as he could tell, it didn’t matter who deserved what: people got what they got and they pretty much had to take it.

On the morning of his life-altering fuck-up, Sims had attended the funeral of a former patient, a five-year-old chatterbox named Kayla Ferguson, who’d been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer — diffuse pontine glioma, to be exact — at the ripe old age of three and a half. Over the course of her illness — long after he’d referred the case to a pediatric neuro-oncologist — Sims had stayed in close touch with Kayla’s mother, fielding her distraught calls at all hours of the day and night. He hadn’t just briefed Heather Ferguson on her daughter’s increasingly dire prognosis, translating Dr. Mehta’s dense (and heavily accented) medical jargon into plain English, he’d become her friend and advisor, listening patiently to marathon rants about her worthless ex-boyfriend, her heartless boss, and her implacable insurance company, offering sympathy and encouragement when he could, doing his best to keep her spirits up through the long and punishing ordeal. Toward the end, she called so frequently that Sims’s wife started to get annoyed, and even a bit jealous, suggesting more than once that he might not have been quite so attentive if Heather Ferguson had been a forty-year-old in roomy mom jeans rather than a twenty-three-year-old single mother who just happened to be “cute like a cheerleader,” which was how Sims had described her in a regrettable moment of candor.

“She’s upset,” he would say. “The least I can do is listen.”

“At two in the morning?”

“Come on, Jackie. Her daughter’s dying.”

Her daughter’s dying. That was his trump card and he played it for all it was worth. Because it was true, of course, but also because Jackie was right: Sims was smitten. He was having all kinds of crazy feelings for Heather Ferguson — he wanted to cook her dinner and pay her medical bills and take her to a luxury spa for a weekend of pampering. He wanted to drive to her house in the middle of the night and make love to her — slowly and tenderly, to distract her from her pain — and then hold her while she cried, and he needed to remind himself every chance he got that it was impossible, because he was a doctor and her daughter was dying. It hadn’t been easy — one night she’d called from her bathtub at three in the morning, midway through her second bottle of wine — but Sims had kept his urges in check, always conducting himself in a professional and ethically responsible manner.

So his conscience was clear when he arrived at the funeral home and made his way into the viewing room, which was packed with people who must have been Heather’s relatives, coworkers, and former classmates, far more of them than he’d expected, given her frequent laments about being alone in the world. Sims took a seat in the last row of folding chairs, relieved to see that the little white coffin was closed. It appeared to be floating on a bed of flowers and stuffed animals; a framed photo of Kayla was resting on the lid, taken before she got sick, a little girl smiling sweetly at the world, waiting in vain for the world to smile back. The memorial service was mercifully short, just a gut-wrenching slide show followed by a generic eulogy, a young minister gamely theorizing that Kayla was an angel now, sitting on a heavenly throne beside a God who loved her so much he couldn’t bear to be apart from her for another day.

When it was over, Sims waited on line to pay his respects to the family. Heather was stationed in front of the coffin, greeting each mourner with a brave, heavily medicated smile, nodding intently at whatever the person said to her, as if she were memorizing a series of secret messages. She was sharing the place of honor with Kayla’s father, a hard-partying roofer who was two years behind on his child support. Sims moved quickly past the deadbeat dad, shaking his hand and offering a few mechanical words of condolence before turning to Heather, his throat constricting with emotion. She looked lovely in her black dress, almost radiant, though her face was dazed and slack with grief.

“Oh, God,” he said, opening his arms. “I am so sorry.”

He stepped forward for the hug — there was no doubt that they would hug, not after everything they’d been through — but instead of accepting the embrace, she shoved him in the chest, an angry, two-handed thrust that made him grunt with surprise.

“Don’t you touch me!” Her voice was shrill and indignant, trembling on the edge of hysteria. “Don’t you dare fucking touch me!”

Sims was too shocked to speak. He wondered if she’d mistaken him for someone else, an old boyfriend, maybe, a jerk who’d hurt her in some unforgivable way.

It’s me, he wanted to tell her. It’s Rick. Dr. Sims.

“You asshole!” She shoved him again, harder than the first time, like a schoolboy starting a fight. She looked almost feral, her face contorted with rage and revulsion. “Why’d you let her die?”

“I didn’t — ” Sims began, but he had no idea how to finish. “We did everything we could.”

“Oh, yeah.” She nodded in bitter agreement. “You did a great job.”

Heather turned toward the coffin, that adorable picture of Kayla, and lost her train of thought for a second or two. When she finally spoke, her voice was softer, more bewildered than angry.

“Really fucking awesome, Dr. Sims. Thanks for all your help.”

“Heather, please…” But by then he was already being led away by an apologetic man in a dark suit, an employee of the funeral home, who escorted him to the front door and ejected him, politely, from the premises.

THAT SAME evening, Sims attended a retirement party for Irene Pollard at the Old Colonial Inn. It was an anomaly — he rarely socialized with the admin staff and wasn’t all that friendly with the guest of honor, a grandmotherly receptionist whose incompetence was legendary around the Health Plan. But he was still a bit shaken by the incident at the funeral home and thought a drink or two might help wash away the bitter taste in his mouth.

The party broke up early, but Sims was detained on his way out by Eduardo Saenz, a gay physical therapist who’d helped him with a shoulder problem a couple of years earlier. Eduardo greeted him with boozy enthusiasm and invited him to share a pitcher of margaritas with some colleagues who’d relocated to a booth in the back room. Sims accepted without hesitation — he still wasn’t ready to go home — and was delighted to discover that the colleagues in question were Olga Kochenko and Kelly Foley, two of his most attractive coworkers. Sims didn’t know either of them very well, but they welcomed him like an old buddy, skipping right past the small talk and inviting him into their conversation.

“We were just talking about threeways,” Kelly informed him from across the table. She was an athletic, short-haired blonde, a nurse practitioner from Cardiology. “There’s a little difference of opinion.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sims nodded sagely, as though he were an expert on the subject. “What’s the problem?”

“Kelly doesn’t like them,” said Olga, a pharmacist whose short skirts and ridiculously high heels made her a frequent topic of lunchtime conversation among the male doctors of Sims’s acquaintance. “She thinks they’re tacky.”

“I never used that word,” Kelly protested. She had the planet Saturn tattooed on the inside of her right forearm, and a pink star outlined in black on the back of her left hand. “I’m just over it, you know? There’s too much to keep track of.”

“Girl, you gotta learn to multitask,” Eduardo told her.

“I can walk and chew gum,” Kelly assured him. “It’s the other people I’m worried about. All those arms and legs flailing around. I’m sick of getting kicked in the face.”

“I’ll tell you what I hate,” Olga volunteered. She was sitting next to Sims, wearing a low-cut peasant blouse that revealed a hint of cleavage, just enough that he felt gallant for averting his gaze. “When you never even signed up for a threeway? Like a few weeks ago, I went home with this hot girl from my Zumba class? We’re in her bedroom, just getting started, and the next thing you know there’s this naked bodybuilder dude standing in the doorway, stroking his dick and filming us with his iPhone. I’m like, Hello? Who the fuck are you? And she’s like, Oh, that’s Benjamin. I hope you don’t mind if he joins us.”

Kelly rolled her eyes and said she’d been there, more than once. Eduardo wanted to hear a little more about Benjamin, but Olga turned her attention to Sims, sizing him up with a playful expression. She had a cute, slightly doughy face that she spiced up with dramatic eye shadow and long fake lashes.

“What about you, Doctor? What’s your professional opinion?”

“About threeways?” Sims made a slow motorboat noise with his lips. “You’re asking the wrong guy. I’m married with six-year-old twins. These days it’s pretty much a miracle if I get a two-way.”

Olga laughed and touched her glass to his. “You’re funny.”

Sims figured they’d move on to a different subject, but they were just getting started. Kelly said she’d had her first threesome back in high school, when she got seduced by a couple whose toddler she was babysitting, which meant that she actually got paid for it. Olga claimed that she’d once started making out with her dental hygienist right in the middle of a cleaning, and that the dentist eventually wandered in and joined the fun. Sims kept saying, Come on, that didn’t happen, but what did he know? Just because he’d washed up on a sexual desert island, that didn’t mean everybody else was stranded, too, doomed to a lifelong diet of coconuts. Some people were living it up on the party boat, enjoying the big buffet.

“You did one together, right?” Eduardo asked.

“Oh, God.” Kelly hid her face in her hands. “That was a disaster.”

“You were fine,” Olga said. “It was totally my fault.”

“She got the giggles,” Kelly told Sims. “And then I got them, too, and we just couldn’t go through with it. The guy got so mad.”

“Who was he?” Sims wanted to know.

Kelly shrugged, like the guy was just an extra in their movie. “Some asshole we met on vacation. Really full of himself.”

“It’s weird,” Olga observed. “I thought it would be nice, ’cause we know each other so well. But when push came to shove, it was like, Yeah, she’s my best friend, but there is no way I’m gonna eat her pussy.”

“Your loss,” Kelly said, and they all laughed.

Sims’s phone buzzed, delivering yet another text from his wife asking when he planned on coming home. Soon, he responded for the third time, grateful for the elasticity of the word, the way it renewed its promise with each passing moment, even as the thought of actually going home grew more and more oppressive. He could picture his arrival, the humiliating interrogation at the door, the way he’d have to account for his whereabouts and grovel for forgiveness, like a teenager who’d broken curfew. It was just too boring to contemplate, such a soul-killing exercise, and it made him wonder if Jackie felt as trapped as he did, as if they’d been cast in a bad play they’d never even auditioned for.

EDUARDO LEFT around ten-thirty, but Sims stuck around to polish off the pitcher. Even in retrospect, he found it hard to blame himself for what happened next. He wasn’t flirting with either of his new friends — not even with Olga, who was sitting so close, her knee bumping companionably against his beneath the table — nor did he possess even the remotest hope of getting laid. He was just happy to be there, killing time, postponing the inevitable return to real life. And he certainly wasn’t making a sexual overture when he stood up and announced that he was off to the men’s room.

“Want some company?” Olga asked.

“Excuse me?” Sims was pretty drunk by then and wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

Olga held his gaze. “I asked if you wanted some company.”

“In the men’s room?”

“Not this again,” Kelly groaned. “What is it with you?”

“I’m curious,” Olga explained. “I just want to see what’s it like in there.”

“It’s really not that great,” Sims assured her.

“All right.” Olga held up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “If it makes you uncomfortable…”

He heard the taunt in her voice, the junior high challenge to his manhood.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “You want to go, let’s go.”

“You sure? I wouldn’t want to put you in an awkward position…”

“It’s a free country,” Sims told her. “You can do whatever you want.”

Olga flashed a victorious grin at Kelly as she slid out of the booth. Even in heels Olga was tiny, at least six inches shorter than Sims, but he felt like a little boy as she took him by the hand and led him through the deserted restaurant. They turned down a narrow hallway alongside the kitchen and stopped in front of a door marked GENTLEMEN. Sims pushed it open and stepped inside, with Olga following close behind. To his great relief, he saw that it was empty.

“Welcome.” He gestured at their humble surroundings — the side-by-side sink and urinal, the lone stall with its swinging door, the overflowing trash can, the dingy tile floor. In the eternal contest between piss and disinfectant, the smell of piss had a slight edge. “I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

“It’s lovely,” she observed. “If I had a men’s room, it would look just like this.”

“I’m glad you like it.” Sims smiled uncertainly. “But if you don’t mind, I kinda have to use the facilities.”

“Go right ahead,” she told him. “I’m just a fly on the wall.”

He could have ducked into the stall, but the dare, as he understood it, required him to use the urinal. He was just drunk enough not to be embarrassed as he unzipped and made the necessary adjustments, turning his body at a slight angle to preserve his modesty. Once he was under way, he glanced over his shoulder and saw Olga standing against the wall beside the hand dryer, watching him with friendly, non-prurient interest. It was a strangely intimate moment, and Sims could feel himself blushing as he turned around and finished his business. Neither of them said a word as he washed and dried his hands, then followed her out of the restroom.

Kelly was gone when they returned to the table. Sims left a tip, then walked Olga out to her car, a Mini Cooper parked at the dark end of the lot. They kissed for a few seconds, and then he bent her over the hood, tugged her panties out of the way, and fucked her from behind, clutching a fistful of her dark hair to steady himself. They didn’t have a condom, so he pulled out; she turned around and knelt uncomplainingly on the gravel, smiling up at him like a suitor about to pop the question.

Sims experienced a powerful moment of euphoria in the run-up to his orgasm — it was almost as if his soul had levitated from his body — but it passed too quickly and he returned to himself with a thud, as if he’d fallen from the sky. He thought suddenly of Jackie — Oh, shit! — and then of Heather, standing in front of her daughter’s coffin. Really fucking awesome, Dr. Sims. When he came, it felt like a rush of sorrow, as if he were pumping molten sadness into Olga’s mouth, though she later remarked that it tasted pretty good, a little sweeter than average.

SIMS REALIZED pretty quickly that the music he wanted to play required an electric guitar. Money was tight — he was paying the condo rent on top of his jumbo mortgage — so he focused on used equipment, checking Craigslist every day, making frequent visits to Rosedale Discount Music and the Guitar Center at the mall, hoping to stumble on a bargain. He came across a few decent instruments in his price range, but nothing that was anywhere near as good as the candy-apple Stratocaster he’d owned back in high school.

About a month into his search, a sympathetic clerk at the Guitar Center told him about Drogan’s, this under-the-radar shop in Gifford that specialized in repairing and rebuilding vintage guitars. The owner was a legendary figure in the rock world, a former roadie who’d worked with lots of famous people.

“It’s pretty funky,” he said. “Definitely worth a look.”

Drogan’s didn’t have a website, but Sims found a listing in the white pages and stopped there on his way home from work the following evening. It was an off-putting place, a low stucco building that could just as easily have housed a machine shop or a XXX video store, squatting between an ugly office complex and a tuxedo rental outlet on a godforsaken stretch of Lake Avenue. There was no signage and only one small window facing the street, nothing to identify the business or suggest that a visitor might be welcome. Sims entered through the side door, startling the guy behind the counter, a middle-aged hipster who’d just taken the first bite out of a monster burrito. He gazed at his visitor in mute apology, eyes wide and cheeks bulging.

“Jush secon,” he mumbled, his mouth full of beans and guacamole.

“Take your time,” Sims told him.

Still chewing, the guy put down the burrito and slid off his stool, wiping his hands on the front of his jeans. He was around Sims’s age, probably early forties, big and soft in the middle, with thinning hair and Civil War muttonchops.

“Sorry, man. You caught me in flagrante. Don’t get much business this time of night.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner.”

“No worries.” The guy took a sip of bottled water, washing down his food. “I’m Mike Drogan, by the way.”

“Rick Sims.”

They shook hands across the counter.

“What can I do for you, Rick?”

Sims hesitated. There were musical accessories inside the display case — strings, picks, capos, tuners, straps — but no instruments in sight.

“I’m looking for a used electric guitar. Not too expensive. But maybe this isn’t—”

“Don’t worry, you’re in the right place.” Mike pointed to a gray metal door, on which the words INNER SANCTUM had been carefully stenciled in black paint. “We keep the guitars in there. It’s easier to control the humidity. Why don’t you take a look while I finish my dinner.”

Sims glanced at the overstuffed burrito on the counter. It was standing upright, protruding from its foil wrapper like a fat banana from a shiny metal peel. A few grains of rice had spilled from the ruptured tortilla onto the glass below.

“Where’s that from?”

Mike seemed pleased by the question. “You know Ernesto’s? Over by the train station? They got this truck that stops by the office building next door, when the cleaning people are there. I basically live on these things.”

“Looks pretty good.”

“Best burrito ever.” Mike tugged on a wiry sideburn, pondering Sims with a knowing expression. “You hungry? I could cut it in half.”

“No, no. I’m not gonna—”

“I’m happy to share,” Mike insisted. “I always stuff myself and then I regret it. You’d be doing me a favor.”

Sims was tempted. He didn’t have any dinner plans, figured he’d stop at Wendy’s on the way home, his last resort on nights like this. Mike’s burrito looked way more appetizing than an industrial chicken sandwich. But it seemed wrong, somehow, taking food from a guy he’d just met.

“That’s okay. I’m gonna check out the guitars.”

“Your call,” Mike said with a shrug. “Just give me a shout if you need anything.”

DROGAN’S HAD a limited inventory, maybe twenty guitars hanging on the walls of the Inner Sanctum, but Sims could see right away that it was an impressive collection, one instrument more valuable than the next. There were no price tags, just index cards identifying the year and model, with a concise descriptive phrase scrawled below — 1957 Telecaster (“a true classic”), 1973 Deluxe Goldtop Les Paul (“Jimmy Page Favorite”), 1968 Chet Atkins Nashville (“all-original hardware”). The only one that seemed remotely in Sims’s ballpark was a 1995 Epiphone SG (“reliable Korean workhorse”), with a white body and black pickguard.

Mike had told him it was okay to handle the merchandise, so he lifted the SG from its hanger and gave it a test drive. It was a lot heavier than the Fenders he’d been considering, but the action was light and fast, and the chunky neck fit nicely in his hand. He strummed the chords to “Down by the River,” and finger-picked the intro to “Stairway to Heaven,” which he’d learned in high school and never forgotten. He was working his way through “One Way Out,” the quick, stuttering riff he hadn’t quite mastered, when he noticed Mike standing in the doorway, looking faintly amused. Sims stopped playing.

“I’m not very good. I’m just getting back into it.”

“Sounds okay to me,” Mike said. “But you gotta plug that thing in and make some noise. It sounds really sweet through this Marshall over here.”

At the other stores he’d visited, Sims had refused to play through an amp. There was always an element of performance when you did that, a sense that you were being watched and judged. The only guys brave enough to do it were the ones who could shred like Steve Vai or Eddie Van Halen, the guys who’d been practicing for years in their bedrooms.

“No thanks.” Sims tried to smile, but his lips felt unnaturally tight. “I’m really not—”

“Tell you what.” Mike tossed him a cable. “Let’s just jam a little. Start with an E blues.”

Sims’s face got hot, as if there were an electrical coil implanted beneath the skin. “I don’t know how.”

“Sure you do.” Mike took a hollow-body Gibson off the wall and plugged it into a small beige amp. “Just play a one-four-five.”

Sims shook his head, a stranger in a strange land.

“It’s your basic blues progression,” Mike explained. “You’ve heard it a million times.”

He started strumming some chords, and Sims recognized the changes right away, the backbone of every Chuck Berry song he’d ever heard. Just an E and an A and a B. He played along until he had it down, at which point Mike broke off for a solo, improvising some tasty licks while Sims struggled to maintain the chug-a-chug rhythm, repeating those three chords over and over, the old one-four-five. Then Mike showed Sims a pattern he could use to play his own solo, a simple five-note scale. Sims’s fingers were slow and clumsy, but it didn’t matter. The notes were right, and they meshed with the chords in gratifying, sometimes magical ways. He felt like he’d cracked some ancient code.

“Jesus,” he said. “It’s almost like I know what I’m doing.”

“You got a nice feel for the music,” Mike told him. “That’s what counts. It’s not about who plays the fastest.”

He showed Sims a basic shuffle, then added some flourishes. They played a slow blues in a minor key and even took a shot at “Born Under a Bad Sign,” with Mike growling the lyrics over Sims’s slightly erratic accompaniment. Sims felt exhausted and exhilarated by the time they called it a night.

“I like this guitar,” he said, carefully replacing the SG on its hook. “Can I ask you what it costs?”

“I’m not sure,” Mike confessed. “Let me check with my uncle.”

“Your uncle?”

“He’s the owner. I’m just helping out.”

“Don’t you have a price list or something?”

“It’s all in his head,” Mike explained. “I’ll try to talk to him tomorrow.”

THE SEX with Olga was quick and dirty. It couldn’t have lasted for more than a couple of minutes. When it was over, she straightened her skirt, dusted off her knees, and kissed him on the cheek.

“See you around,” she told him.

On the way home, Sims didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what had happened, or what it meant, because he was pretty sure it hadn’t meant a thing. It was just dumb luck, as if he’d stumbled upon a bank robbery and somehow ended up with a bag of money in his hand. He wasn’t innocent, he understood that, but he wasn’t exactly guilty, either, or at least not as guilty as he looked. He was mostly just concerned with avoiding a scene at home, figuring out a way to get past Jackie without telling too many lies.

As it turned out, he didn’t need to tell a single one because she’d given up and gone to bed. She barely stirred when he slipped in beside her, just mumbled, That you? and went back to sleep. In the morning she acted like everything was fine, bustling around the kitchen in her robe, making lunch for the twins, giving him the usual rundown of her daily schedule — ten o’clock yoga, shopping at Whole Foods, and then she had to take the boys to the Rock Gym for their climbing class, the later session, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to start dinner until six at the earliest, so maybe it would be better if they did some kind of takeout. It wasn’t until Trevor and Jason went upstairs to get dressed that she dropped the act.

“What the hell happened last night?”

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I had a little too much to drink. I should’ve called.”

To his surprise, she didn’t press for details.

“Are you hungover?”

“Nothing a few cups of coffee can’t fix.”

She managed a tiny smile, but he could see that it cost her something.

“Please don’t do that again, Rick. It’s really disrespectful. Not just to me — to the boys, too. They kept asking me when you were coming home.”

“Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”

That was it, nothing like the third-degree he’d been dreading. He dropped the boys at school, grabbed a venti latte at Starbucks, and continued on to the Health Plan, wondering if there would be any awkwardness with Olga. It had been a long time since Sims had had drunken sex with someone he barely knew, and he had no idea what sort of morning-after protocol was currently in effect. You were probably just supposed to send a friendly text — Thx!! That was fun!!! — but he was old-school, so he headed straight to the Pharmacy to say hello, only to discover that he’d been let off the hook for the second time that morning.

“Olga’s not in,” said the assistant, a young Muslim woman in a headscarf. “She called in sick.”

“I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“Food poisoning.” The assistant smiled wryly. “Olga gets that a lot. Especially after parties.”

By mid-afternoon, Sims had begun to wish he’d taken the day off himself. His head was throbbing and his mouth felt parched, no matter how much water he drank. And there was always one more kid to examine, another tongue to depress, another scrawny arm to jab with a needle. And all the while, the sound of his own droning voice.

How’s fourth grade treating ya? Wearing your seatbelt? Any trouble concentrating? No, that’s perfectly normal. Just a sprain. An ingrown hair. Let me take a look. Try not to scratch that, okay, champ?

He rallied toward the end of the day and was feeling a little better as he exited the building. It was a sunny afternoon in early April; a fresh, blustery wind swept across the parking lot like a promise of better things to come. Sims was tired and a little distracted — he was debating whether to pick up some flowers for Jackie — so it didn’t even occur to him to be alarmed when he saw the stranger waiting by his Audi: a man, probably in his late fifties, balding and thickly built, wearing a rumpled gray suit.

“Are you Sims?” he inquired, the slightest trace of a foreign accent in his voice.

“I’m Dr. Sims. Can I help you?”

The man smiled and extended his hand. Even as he reciprocated, Sims felt the first vague inklings of trouble.

“I’m Yevgeny Kochenko,” the man said, squeezing Sims’s hand with more than the usual pressure. “Olga’s my wife.”

“What?” Sims laughed in spite of himself. He tried to extricate his hand, but Yevgeny’s grip seemed to be tightening. “Olga’s not married.”

“You think it’s okay to fuck my wife?” Yevgeny asked in a weirdly calm voice as he crushed Sims’s hand in his own. “How you like it if I fuck your wife? Maybe I fuck her in the ass? How about that, Dr. Sims?”

Sims flashed back to the night before, trying to remember if Olga had been wearing a ring or had said anything to suggest that she had a husband. He was sure she hadn’t — she’d seemed pretty damn single to him — but even if she had, he would have pictured a much-younger, better-looking man with a full head of hair.

“You sure you’re married to Olga?” he said, but instead of answering the question, Yevgeny punched him in the stomach and then in the face, and that was just the beginning.

LUCKILY FOR Sims, there was a fair amount of activity in the parking lot. Several people witnessed the assault and started screaming; two security guards rushed out of the building and intervened before Yevgeny could inflict any irreparable damage. Sims was taken to the ER at Rosedale General, where he was treated for facial lacerations — twelve stitches under the right eye, seven more on the chin — and diagnosed with a mild concussion. The doctor kept him under observation for a couple of hours before letting him go.

Jackie didn’t say much in the hospital, and she was just as quiet on the way home. She could barely look at him, didn’t seem the least bit concerned about his condition or curious to know why he’d been attacked by a sixty-year-old Russian jewelry-store owner whose much-younger wife worked in the Health Plan Pharmacy. The silence was unnerving, and Sims couldn’t stand it for more than a couple of minutes.

“It wasn’t an affair,” he said, trying to move his puffy lips as little as possible. His whole mouth hurt, even his fucking tongue, which he’d accidentally bitten at some point in the proceedings. “It was just one time. Last night at the retirement party.”

“I don’t care, Rick. I really don’t want to know.”

Sims switched the ice pack from his left cheek to his right. The Percocet was starting to wear off.

“We were drinking and she followed me into the men’s room.”

That got her attention.

“You had sex in the men’s room?”

“No. She just stood there and watched me pee.”

“Is that some kind of turn-on?”

“I don’t know. We were drunk.”

“So where’d you do it?”

“In the parking lot. Up against her car.”

“Congratulations.” She gave him a big thumbs-up. “Did you at least use a condom?”

Sims winced. “There wasn’t a lot of planning.”

“Terrific. Now we can both get herpes.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was really irresponsible.”

“Or maybe she’ll get pregnant!” Jackie upped the volume on the fake enthusiasm. “Wouldn’t that be cool? One big happy family.”

“That’s not gonna happen. I didn’t—”

“Really?”

“No, I mean…” Sims knew he was talking too much, but he couldn’t seem to stop. Maybe it was the medication, or maybe just the feeling that it didn’t matter anymore, since he’d already been punished for his sins. “In her mouth.”

Jackie made a face. That was one thing she could do without.

“You’re such a stud. I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.”

Sims moved the ice bag to his shoulder. He couldn’t remembering being punched or kicked in the shoulder and had no idea why it hurt so much.

“I swear to God,” he said. “I didn’t know she was married.”

“But she knew you were.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I hope you said nice things about me. Like how I cook your dinner and wash your underwear and take your kids everywhere they need to go.”

“Jackie, please. You have to understand. I was a mess yesterday. This really fucked-up thing happened at the memorial service.”

He told her about Heather Ferguson, the way she’d shoved him and cursed him in front of the coffin, in front of all those people, how he’d been kicked out of the funeral home and forbidden to go to the cemetery.

“Can you believe that? After everything I did for her. All those phone calls and hospital visits, all the time and energy I gave to that poor little girl. To get treated like I was the bad guy…”

Sims fell into a brooding silence. He wondered if he would ever see Heather again, how much time would have to go by before he could call and ask how she was doing. Maybe they could get together for coffee, he thought, maybe talk a little about what had happened, if she was feeling up to it. It would help to know what she’d been thinking, to have some kind of an explanation, if not the apology he deserved.

“I loved her,” he said, surprised not just by the words, but by the fact that he’d blurted them out, and the terrible realization that they were true. “And she broke my heart.”

Jackie didn’t say anything after that, didn’t even look at him. She kept her eyes straight ahead, leaning forward and squinting through the windshield as though she were driving through a blizzard. She seemed okay when they got home: she paid the babysitter, got Sims settled into bed with a fresh ice pack, and gave him another Percocet. Then she kissed him on the forehead with a little more tenderness than he might have expected.

“As soon as you’re feeling a little better,” she told him, “you’re gonna have to find someplace else to live.”

IT WAS harder than Sims anticipated to get a price quote on the SG. Mike’s uncle Ace — he was the famous ex-roadie, friend of Stephen Stills and Boz Scaggs, and lots of other notables — was suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s, and he wasn’t always sharp enough to talk business. Mike said it was tough to see him like that; he’d always been bigger than life, an ageless, incorrigible hippie who rode a chopper and chased younger women well into his sixties. Now Uncle Ace was fading away at the Golden Orchard Assisted Living Community, surrounded by decrepitude, losing touch with himself and his hard-rocking past. He didn’t care about his guitar collection anymore; half the time he didn’t even recognize his favorite nephew.

“Used to be he had good and bad days,” Mike said. “But lately it’s more like bad days and worse days.”

Sims didn’t mind the delay; it gave him a standing excuse to stop by the store on his way home and ask if there was any news. Mike always seemed to happy to see him and was always up for a little jamming.

“You’re getting a lot better,” he’d tell Sims. “You must be practicing.”

It gradually turned into a regular thing, three or four nights a week. They’d grab a burrito from the truck, talk a little while they ate, then retire to the Inner Sanctum to play those amazing guitars through those vintage amps, as loud as they wanted. The store was pretty well soundproofed, and there were no neighbors to disturb in any case.

“Check this out,” Mike would say, and he’d launch into the intro of “Hey Joe” or “Texas Flood,” whatever song they’d decided to work on. “Is that sweet or what?”

Mike was a talented musician — he’d been playing in bands since he was twelve — and a patient, generous teacher. He guided Sims through a host of classic tunes — “Mannish Boy,” “You Shook Me,” “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” — stopping when necessary to expound on any theoretical or technical issues that arose. The amount of new information was overwhelming at times — the major and minor pentatonics, the chord inversions, the double stops and slurs and whole-note bends — but it was exactly what Sims needed, a musical boot camp, an intensive, ongoing tutorial in the art of blues guitar. He tried to formalize the arrangement a couple of times, offering to pay the going rate for lessons, but Mike wouldn’t hear of it, though he did let Sims buy the burritos and keep the mini-fridge stocked with beer.

When they were done, they would sit around for another hour or two, listening to Roy Buchanan and Buddy Guy and Hubert Sumlin, marveling at the precision and raw passion these artists brought to the music, and that indefinable something that made each one unique.

“Holy shit!” Mike would say when something really great happened, a blinding solo run, or a single, piercing note at the crucial moment. He sounded incredulous, even a little pissed off. “Motherfucker!”

It was usually pretty late by the time Sims left, and he always felt a little melancholy heading out to his car, partly because the thought of going home to the condo depressed him, but mainly because he felt bad for Mike, who wasn’t going anywhere. For the past six months, he’d been living in the store, sleeping on a couch in the back office, showering at a gym down the road. Talk about the blues, he said. He’d been out of work for two and a half years, ever since he got laid off from his IT job when the market imploded and everything went south.

His marriage fell apart a year later, though he insisted it had nothing to do with his employment situation. The real deal-breaker was the Chester A. Arthur facial hair he’d decided to cultivate in an attempt to cheer himself up. He thought his new sideburns-and-mustache combo looked pretty cool, but his ex-wife begged to differ. She said it creeped her out and refused to have sex with him until he got rid of it. Sims didn’t say so, but he could see her point. Mike’s muttonchops were bushy and reddish gray, with a disconcertingly pubic texture, and the pointy tips extended all the way to the corners of his mouth.

“What happened to the mustache?” Sims asked.

“I got rid of it,” Mike replied. “As a peace offering. But that wasn’t good enough for Pam.”

“You really got divorced because of your sideburns?”

Mike made an ambiguous bobbing motion with his head.

“We had some other problems,” he admitted.

“Did you ever go to counseling?”

“We didn’t have the right insurance. But I don’t think it would’ve helped much.”

Sims was curious because he and Jackie had recently tried couples counseling themselves. Jackie kept insisting that Sims had stopped loving her because she’d gained so much weight during pregnancy and hadn’t been able to lose it. In her mind, that was the key to everything — the reason why their sex life was so unrewarding, the reason why he never listened to a word she said, and the reason he’d fallen in love with Heather Ferguson, who was so much younger and thinner than she was. Sims kept trying to tell her that it wasn’t the extra weight that bothered him, it was her complete lack of interest in sex, her attitude of pained resignation every time he touched her. She said she only acted like that because of the way he looked at her, the disgust that he didn’t even bother to conceal.

“I can’t forgive you for that,” she told him. “All those years you made me feel like shit.”

They gave up after three sessions when it became clear that talking about their problems just made things worse. It was a relief to throw in the towel, or at least it would’ve been if not for the boys, and the knowledge that his relationship with them was broken, too, that he’d never get a chance to be the kind of father he’d hoped to be.

He told Mike about their seventh birthday party, to which Jackie had grudgingly invited him. It wasn’t one of those fancy parties — no magicians or ponies or cotton-candy machines — just a bunch of neighborhood kids running around the yard in goofy hats, climbing on the cedar play structure that Sims had assembled from a kit three years earlier. He tried chatting with some of the other parents, but they treated him with strained, wary politeness, as if he carried some sort of communicable disease. But at least his boys were happy to have him there. Trevor, the bigger and sweeter of the twins, kept running over to Sims and jumping into his arms, the way he had when he was a toddler. Jason, smaller and more verbally adept, kept telling Sims that he loved him, though he also kicked him in the shins a couple of times, completely out of the blue, with what felt like genuine animosity. Both boys cried when Sims said good-bye — Trevor kept begging him to stay for a sleepover — and when Sims got back to the condo, he opened a bottle of bourbon and drank himself to sleep.

“Tell me it gets better,” he said. “Tell me I’m not gonna feel like crap for the rest of my life.”

Mike stroked his upper lip, the bare skin where his mustache used to be. He had two kids of his own, both in high school.

“It helps to play the guitar,” he said. “That’s the only thing that works for me.”

IN EARLY September, six months after they’d separated, Jackie invited Sims to Trastevere, the new Italian place in the center of town. He figured she wanted to talk about the divorce settlement, though as far as he knew, there wasn’t a whole lot left to discuss. According to Sims’s lawyer, the negotiations were substantively complete, just a few remaining i’s to dot and t’s to cross, nothing too momentous. The process had been surprisingly amicable; both he and Jackie had acted like responsible adults, keeping the best interests of the kids front and center, neither of them picking petty fights or making unreasonable demands. Sims had grumbled a bit about the custody arrangement — he would only get the twins on Wednesday and Saturday, and only Saturday would be an overnight — but Jackie had convinced him that the boys needed as much stability and continuity as possible during this difficult time of transition. And besides, he knew how much space they required, how much they loved kicking the soccer ball in the backyard and playing Wii sports on the big-screen TV in the basement rec room. He had no doubt that the condo would feel as cramped and depressing to them as it did to him.

Jackie was ten minutes late, and Sims almost didn’t recognize her when she finally showed up. She was wearing a black-and-gray dress that he’d never seen before, very flattering, but it was more than that; it was the confidence with which she approached the table, the enigmatic smile and subdued little wave she gave him when their eyes met. He’d been aware of subtle changes in her appearance over the past few months — she’d lost weight, colored her hair, done something new with her makeup — but he hadn’t registered the cumulative effect until she sat down across from him. This was a new Jackie, a far cry from the frumpy, defeated woman he’d been living with.

“Wow,” he said. “You look great.”

“Thanks.” She studied him for a moment, her eyes narrowing with maternal concern. “You, too.”

He knew she was lying. Bachelor life had been hard on him. He’d put on fifteen pounds — too many burritos, too much beer — and hadn’t spent nearly enough time outdoors. His skin was pasty, and he’d grown a salt-and-pepper soul patch that Mike liked a lot, but that had earned him a lot of good-natured ribbing at the Health Plan. His colleagues called him Jazzman and Dr. Beatnik and asked if they could borrow his bongo drum.

“I gotta lose some weight,” he said. “I eat too much junk.”

“You should hire a personal trainer,” she suggested. “That’s the only thing that worked for me.”

“Trainers are pretty expensive. I don’t think I can afford one.”

If Jackie heard the implicit criticism — after all, it was Sims’s money that had paid for her newly toned physique, not to mention the haircut and the pretty dress — she chose to ignore it.

“It’s worth it, Rick. Not just for your appearance, you know? Just for the way you feel about yourself. About the whole world. It’s makes such a difference if you feel good about yourself.”

Sims couldn’t stop staring at her lips. They seemed so much fuller and more sensual than he remembered. Maybe it was the lipstick, he thought. She hadn’t worn lipstick for years.

“I’ve been playing a lot of guitar,” he said. “Getting pretty good, actually. I practice every night. It’s kinda what’s keeping me sane.”

“That’s great,” she said, opening her menu. “It’s good to have a hobby.”

Sims hated that word — hobby. Music wasn’t a hobby. It was a basic human activity, as essential as language or religion, though he didn’t imagine that Jackie saw it like that. Music had never meant much to her, not even when she was young. As far as Sims knew, she’d never had a favorite band, only went to concerts when she was dragged along by school friends or guys she was dating. It had been a rift between them, the fact that he had a musical life and she didn’t.

“How are the kids?” he asked. “Everything okay at school?”

“Jason’s doing fine, but Trevor’s struggling with the math, as usual. I think he’s gonna need a tutor.”

Sims nodded grimly, adding another fifty or a hundred bucks a week to his mental tally. But what could you do? If the kid needed a tutor, he needed a tutor.

“What about you?” he said. “Anything new?”

“Well…” She hesitated for moment. “I think I’m gonna start studying for my real estate license.”

“Really?”

“I probably won’t make a lot of money at first, but there’s a lot of potential in the long run. Especially if the market picks up.”

“Hey, that’s great. I bet you’ll be good at that.”

The waitress came and took their orders. Sims kept staring at Jackie as she pored over the menu. She reminded him of someone, though he wasn’t exactly sure of whom. But then she smiled and said she’d like the scallops, and suddenly it was clear: the new Jackie reminded him of the Jackie he’d met ten years ago, the woman he’d fallen in love with and proposed to on the Staten Island Ferry. It was like she’d gone up to the attic and taken her old self out of storage, not just the face and the body, but that glow, that fresh, lovely glow that a woman gets when she knows she’s loved and desired. Sims hadn’t seen that glow for a long time.

She must have been reading his mind because she smiled sadly when the waitress left and said there was something else she needed to tell him, a pretty big thing, actually: she’d been seeing someone for the past three months, a high school assistant principal named Paul Gutierrez, and they’d just gotten engaged over the weekend. She held up her left hand so he could see the diamond ring, right there where Sims’s bigger diamond had once glittered.

“Paul’s a sweet guy,” she told him. “And the boys really like him.”

“Wow.” Sims kept his eyes on her finger. It was a lot easier than looking at her face. “That was quick.”

“When you’re our age, there’s not much reason to wait.”

“Wow,” he said again. “How the fuck did that happen?”

SIMS TOOK the news pretty hard. It was bad enough to think about Jackie sleeping with another man, but what killed him was the idea of this Paul guy living in his house, raising his kids. It was a weird, demoralizing feeling, knowing that this stranger would be helping Jason and Trevor with their homework, dropping them off at school, picking them up from soccer practice. Paul would play catch with them in the yard and take them on beach vacations, where they’d body surf and collect shells and little pieces of colored glass, and in the evening he’d take them out for pizza and ice cream. Maybe he’d take them on a day trip to the amusement park, where he’d ride the roller coaster, screaming along with the boys, and years later they’d all think back to that vacation and remember how great it was, how much they’d felt like a real family.

Mike’s ex-wife had a boyfriend of her own, so he knew exactly what Sims was going through.

“His name is Denny.” Mike shook his head, as if the name were too much to bear. “The kids talk about him all the time. Denny this, Denny that. Denny drives a Honda Element. That’s his big claim to fame.”

“This guy Paul, I’m sure he’s perfectly nice. But I just want to beat the crap out of him, you know? Just on principle.”

Mike scowled approvingly, as if watching a mental movie of the beatdown.

“Denny’s a graphic designer. But he plays rugby for fun. Who the fuck plays rugby?”

The only consolation for Sims was financial. He wasn’t sure how much money an assistant principal made, but he figured it had to be a pretty decent amount, which meant that Jackie and the boys would be able to maintain the standard of living they were accustomed to without relying solely on Sims. And who knew? Maybe Jackie would get her real estate career off the ground one of these days. That would give him even more breathing room if he ever decided to make a career change. It was just too stressful being a pediatrician, his stomach clenching up every time he examined a sick kid, not knowing which of his patients was the next Kayla Ferguson, the one holding the unlucky ticket. He just wanted to do something else for a while, a job that didn’t involve telling a mother that her child was going to die.

What he really wanted to do was start a blues band with Mike, find a drummer and a bassist, play a few local gigs, and see where it led. They’d been talking about it for a while, and Mike had been putting out feelers, checking around with some of his musician buddies to see if anyone was available. In the meantime, they’d been working hard on some songs, mostly covers, but a couple of originals, too, music by Mike, lyrics by Sims.

When they knew they were ready, they went into the Inner Sanctum, plugged in their guitars, and made a cell-phone video of “Born Under a Bad Sign,” playing along with a backing track Mike had recorded on his laptop. They did six takes before they nailed it, Sims holding down the rhythm without a hitch, Mike singing with bitter conviction and adding some sizzling lead guitar. When they were finished, they bumped fists and uploaded their file to YouTube. After that, there was nothing to do but sit back, crack open a cold one, and wait for someone to notice. On the whole, Sims was proud and hopeful — he thought they’d done an excellent job with the song — but there was a faint current of dread running beneath his optimism, because good things turned to shit all the time, and you couldn’t always see it coming.