“Oh,” Ruth says. “It really doesn’t matter.”

“Well, which do you think Isabelle would prefer?”

“Wilson, it really doesn’t make that much difference. I don’t know, go to the diner.”

“It’s on Fifty-eighth,” he says. “Fifty-eighth and Third.”

“Okay,” Ruth says. “I shouldn’t be much later than one thirty. As soon as my appointment is through.”

“All right,” Wilson says. And then he asks, almost tentatively, it seems to Ruth, what her appointment is for.

She hesistates, caught off guard, because her appointment isn’t a doctor’s appointment, or a dentist’s appointment, or anything warranting Wilson’s canceling of his meeting to take Isabelle to lunch; she is going to the spa. But the appointment had been hard to get; she’d had to make it two weeks in advance, and, she thinks, she needs it. But still. “Eye doctor,” she says. “My contacts have been killing me, so I’m going to see if I can try another kind. Maybe the soft ones.”

“Oh,” Wilson says. “I didn’t know they were bothering you.”

“Well, they have been, Wilson,” she says, defensively, angry at herself for having lied; why shouldn’t she take a fucking hour for herself? She can’t remember the last time she did.

“I’m sure they have,” Wilson says quietly.

II

The shrink’s office is off the lobby of a residential building uptown. Wilson sits on a stiff Victorian chair in the waiting room, which is paneled in dark wood; it is cavernous and dim. The dish of potpourri on the table beside him smells like something distant and familiar, but what about it is familiar he’s not sure. He can’t tell if the feeling it gives him is one of comfort or fear, and that the two can be indistinguishable like this is disconcerting. He shifts in his seat, his hands curled around the clawlike ends of the wooden arms, and glances at the clock on the wall. There are ten more minutes until Isabelle’s appointment is over.

The sound of the doorbell breaks into the room’s formal silence, and the secretary, tucked away behind her counter, buzzes the ringers in—a boy maybe seven or eight years old and his mother, both without hats or scarves. Their ears are red. The mother wipes snot from her son’s face with her glove. She hangs his coat and then her own on the rack by the door, and she nods to the secretary as she passes her counter. The secretary smiles; they seem to know each other well enough, Wilson thinks, and he wonders how long this mother and her son have been coming here.