“Well, this is the first place he’s gonna look,” I said.

“If he comes here I’ll call the cops,” she said. “And he’s already got a DUI. Just let me in. Please.”

I locked the door behind her.

“Let me see,” she said. “Jesus. Do you have the rest of the tooth?”

“No,” I said. “Should I?”

“Sometimes if you have the rest of the tooth they can put it back together.”

“It’s just a tooth,” I said.

She kissed my forehead, my nose, my chin. She went for my lips and I pulled away. My mouth felt like a swamp of bone and blood. She pushed my shoulders down slowly and I maneuvered myself into a sitting position. She unzipped my fly and pulled down my shorts. When she lowered herself onto my lap a sharp pain went through my leg. I tried to ignore it and concentrate on the mechanics at hand, but it seemed, in any case, that I’d taken too many Percocets to get hard. She tugged on me until it became unpleasant and I put my hand on her wrist to stop her. She gave me a tight-lipped smile and settled beside me on the couch. She made herself come, or at least pretended to, and rested her head on my shoulder. “That was nice,” she whispered in my ear. I gave her a Percocet and she curled up and slept until the sun came through the big picture window.

“Damn, I’ve got to go home,” she said.

“I don’t know if you should do that,” I said. “You want some breakfast?”

“What, Triscuits and mustard?” she said. “I’ll be okay. Jim was just upset because you were being a jerk. Now I fucked you and you don’t need to be a jerk anymore and things will settle down.”

It occurred to me that I did not know or understand this woman.

“I’ve got a dentist appointment in a couple hours,” I said.

“You know, I went to high school with these two girls, twins,” Chloe said. “They both became dental assistants or hygienists or whatever, and they worked in the same office. So you’d go in and get your teeth X-rayed and it would be Amanda, and then you’d go sit in the chair to get your teeth cleaned and it would be Katherine. They looked exactly the same, they both bleached their hair, they both wore those little white dentist coats. I always figure dentists are having sex with their assistants, you know, and you have to wonder what was going on with those two. I mean, they were doing stuff in the chair, probably, knowing them. This was back in Helena.”