“Yes. Such an obvious thing but it never occurred to me she would do it. Not my wife, not to me. I wasn’t the last person in town to find out, but I wasn’t the first either. My patients began to treat me differently. It was like I was the one who was sick. They would come to my office and try to comfort me. But for what I didn’t understand. Until one evening Maggie said she was going out to visit a girlfriend. She left Scott and Gene home with me. I remember that night well. Scott was asleep upstairs in his crib. He was maybe a year old, no longer breast-feeding. Gene was building a model plane out of balsa wood on the kitchen table. I was in the living room reading a medical article about the spread of venereal disease in society as a result of all the soldiers coming back home infected. It was a warm night like tonight and I had the windows open. Then it occurred to me that I had to find Maggie. That something was wrong. But I can’t say I thought she was with another man.”

“You just felt sick in your stomach?” Kelly said.

“Exactly. I told Gene to keep an eye on Scott, that I would be back in a few minutes. That might seem a strange thing to do—to leave a ten-year-old with an infant. But Trenton was safe in those days. No one ever locked their doors. I planned to hop over to her girlfriend’s house and come right back. It was only two blocks away. But when I got there, Elaine said she hadn’t seen Maggie. She hadn’t spoken to her all day.”

Dr. Banks took a drag on his cigarette. He continued to stare at the night. “My guts turned to ice. It was as if everything unusual about her behavior crystallized right then. I knew she was lying to me. I knew she was with someone else. There was this man, a contractor named Bob Mortega. He had done some work for us on the garage a few months before and I remembered how uncomfortable I had felt while he was in the house. The way he and Maggie would look at each other when they didn’t think I was watching. He was handsome, Italian—one of those guys who flirt with every pretty woman. But he was so crude I didn’t know what she saw in him. But obviously he did something for her that I could not. That night, when I reached his house, I peeked in the side window and saw them kissing on the living room floor. He was in the middle of undressing her. His hand … his hairy hand, was on her breast.”

Dr. Banks stopped. They sat in silence. His wheezing grew worse and he stopped smoking. The ash gathered at the end of his cigarette.