Lying on the table, Frances turned her head away. She had not come to Palmer’s office today because of that condition, and did not want to discuss it.

When Frances first met Palmer a year or so before, he wore little wire glasses and, beneath his lab coat, tight, pinkish pants that may have been fashionable either somewhere outside of Munson, or during another era. Munson’s town council had struggled to find a new physician for the region, because old Doctor Frann, the silent, hoary physician of the mustard-colored skin whom Frances had known all her life, had died while napping in the woods.

Palmer arrived to town good-naturedly, though folks did not care for the stranger’s manner or clothing. But Palmer carried at all times a letter written to him in his childhood by a distant relative who, decades before, had lived and died in Munson. Over time, skittish townsfolk—Frances, her mother, and sister included—began to accept the doctor.

Now, Palmer’s clothing fitted more loosely, and his glasses were box-shaped. Continuing the tradition with the old doctor, Frances saw Palmer regularly for the procedure her mother had advocated years before. Sharply painful, but over so fast that the pain amounted to something ineffable, the treatment seemed to help slightly. When Frances had endured the procedure’s discomfort last month, wincing, Palmer shook his head slowly, exhaling, but she did not understand why.

Now Palmer stood before her, smiling, arms dangling; a quality of suspension befell the room. In a moment, he was gone. Frances rested tiredly on the exam table, drawing in air, hearing him enter another exam room down the hall, saying reproachingly, “Now, Mrs. Best . . .” Slowly, Frances rose from the table, recalling a solid sack of sugar that leaned against her damp basement wall at home. She dressed carefully, and after some minutes tiptoed from the exam room through the hallway, passing Palmer’s small office crowded with stacks of paper, books, and slithery magazines. The doctor was sitting at his desk. As she passed, to Frances’ surprise, he raced to the doorway, hand extended, calling. “Frances, Frances—come have a seat! Come in!” His glasses were askew, and the hand held a buttered cracker, gesturing for her to sit down.

He sat, tugging at the hem of the short lab coat that scantly covered his hips, smiling boyishly, chewing, shrugging. “How goes life?” he asked.

Frances faced the doctor with discomfort, imagining that he perceived everything: her worries, her attempts to hide these, and the vulnerable surface of her mind that rippled with sensations of flight.

She was lost.

“How’s your fellow—Ray—isn’t that his name?”

“Fine.” The office, with its insulation of books and paper, compacted the sound of her voice.

The doctor laughed softly, as if automatically. “Life is full of drama!” he offered, setting the cracker on a plate. “Actually, I prefer comedy to drama; drama bothers me,” he rattled on. “Yet we can’t avoid it, even in Munson.”