By rights, Jack should have headed west when his wife, Alex, left him, but they lived in California so he drove east, folding down the visor each morning against the sun. He didn’t wait to find a cheap motel at night, just pulled off the road and slept cramped in the car a few hours. At dawn he thrust a stick of Right Guard up under his shirt—the rock ‘n’ roll shower—and drove until he found coffee. He thought that traveling alone was like being in therapy—the things you found out about yourself.

Speeding across the Bonneville Salt Flats, Jack played car golf, weaving in and out of the lanes trying to roll the Ping-Pong ball in the passenger seat well into the Styrofoam coffee cup that was on its side after spilling out most of the coffee. Jack was good at this.

Not that he’d been invited, but he was, he realized, going to New York, to the home of his friend the doctor, the closest thing to rehab he could find.

Jack signaled and changed lanes at the exit for the Long Island Expressway, and remembered Alex’s directions, the way she would say “then turn left six blocks before the liquor store.” He’d phoned from the last gas station. The doctor said they would be glad to see him. Jack had to ask, “Does Vicki still talk about feelings all the time?”

Vicki had given him a diary one Christmas, a blank book that stayed blank, and which Jack had titled “Jackie’s Log of Feelings.” Vicki was a good mimic and did a dead-on imitation of Jack as if he were a psychiatrist wincing at a patient’s confession, ordering a depressed person to “just snap out of it” or leaning forward in his therapist’s chair saying, simply, “Handle it.”

Jack had offered to take them out to dinner, but the doctor wanted to barbecue, so Jack stopped at a market and bought three big steaks on the way. It was too soon for even Vicki to try to fix him up is what he told himself when he considered buying four.

In summer, the town was a beach resort. In realtor parlance, Vicki and the doctor lived on the wrong side of the highway, but it was still only a five-minute drive to the water.

At the door, Vicki gave Jack a kiss and a bath towel, and pointed him down the hall, which made a thick gold bracelet slide the length of her forearm to her wrist. “It’s one of those ‘Honey, I’m sorry’ gifts,” she said, and Jack said, “Nice. Get him angry again.”

The doctor had a cold beer for him when Jack came out of the shower smelling of mandarin orange-scented soap. They showed him around the house, an Arts and Crafts cottage built in 1932. Since his last visit, they’d replaced the previous owner’s insane wallpaper (shelves of books behind chicken wire) and pried off the bedroom floors’ linoleum, the pattern of which was a photograph of carpeting, revealing wide planks of clean pine.