Behind his patient, propped against the wall, was the framed Hockney print that Lila had given Clint to “warm the place up.” He planned to hang it later that day. Beside the print were his half-unpacked boxes of medical texts.

Someone needs to help this man, the young doctor found himself thinking, and they ought to do it in a nice, quiet room like this. But should that person be Clinton R. Norcross, MD?

He had, after all, worked awfully hard to become a doctor, and there had been no college fund to help Clint along. He had grown up under difficult circumstances and paid his own way, sometimes in more than money. To get through he had done things he had never told his wife about, and never would. Was this what he had done those things for? To treat the sexually ambitious Paul Montpelier?

A tender grimace of apology creased Montpelier’s wide face. “Oh, boy. Shoot. I’m not doing this right, am I?”

“You’re doing it fine,” Clint said, and for the next thirty minutes, he consciously put his doubts aside. They stretched the thing out; they looked at it from all sides; they discussed the difference between desire and need; they talked about Mrs. Montpelier and her pedestrian (in Montpelier’s opinion) bedroom preferences; they even took a surprisingly candid detour to visit Paul Montpelier’s earliest adolescent sexual experience, when he had masturbated using the jaws of his little brother’s stuffed crocodile.

Clint, according to his professional obligation, asked Montpelier if he’d ever considered harming himself. (No.) He wondered how Montpelier would feel if the roles were reversed? (He insisted that he’d tell her to do what she needed to do.) Where did Montpelier see himself in five years? (That’s when the man in the white sweater vest started to weep.)

At the end of the session, Montpelier said he was already looking forward to the next, and as soon as he departed, Clint rang his service. He directed them to refer all of his calls to a psychiatrist in Maylock, the next town over. The operator asked him for how long.

“Until snow flurries are reported in hell,” said Clint. From the window he watched Montpelier back up his candy-red sports car and pull out of the lot, never to be seen again.

Next, he called Lila.

“Hello, Dr. Norcross.” The feeling her voice gave him was what people meant—or should have meant—when they said their hearts sang. She asked him how his second day was going.

“The least self-aware man in America dropped in for a visit,” he said.

“Oh? My father was there? I bet the Hockney print confused him.”

She was quick, his wife, as quick as she was warm, and as tough as she was quick. Lila loved him, but she never stopped bumping him off his mark. Clint thought he probably needed that. Probably most men did.

“Ha-ha,” Clint had said. “Listen, though: that opening you mentioned at the prison. Who did you hear about that from?”