“We put up a detached garage,” the doctor said, adding, for the nth time, “it doesn’t care if you park in it or not.” The tour concluded on the redwood deck the doctor had built himself.

“Things are looking pretty swep’-up around here,” Jack said.

Vicki, in faded cutoffs, kicked off espadrilles and took the red butterfly chair. She observed that Jack always said he was on his way out when he called. “It’s like you can’t make an entrance until you’ve established your exit.”

Jack hated for people to analyze his behavior. He hated for them to notice it. He moved to give the doctor a hand with the steaks and managed to fork one off the grill and into the coals. “Oops,” he said, fishing for it. “Mine.”

“Doctors can’t say ‘Oops,’” the doctor said. “Doctors say ‘There.’”

Jack had resisted the temptation to run his latest symptoms by the doctor, but when the doctor asked him how he was, Jack told the truth about the shoulder that had betrayed him. The doctor was in orthopedics and so gifted at treating sports injuries that he had become a team physician, retained to see to football stars. It looked glamorous to Jack—his friend going out onto the field and examining the swelling million-dollar knees. But it was really “like veterinary medicine,” the doctor had told him. “You can’t get a history from those guys.”

“I’ll give you a shot of cortisone after dinner,” the doctor said.

Jack was glad Vicki had gone to check on the corn and hadn’t heard him use the word betray. When she joined them back on the deck, Jack asked Vicki if she would get him another beer.

“Why? Your leg broken, hon?”

“Bring me one, too,” the doctor told Jack.

They ate around a redwood picnic table with a pole poked through the center for an umbrella. There were pink flamingos on the plastic tumblers and chili peppers painted on the rims of the plates. “In a year or so,” the doctor said, “we’ll have a swimming pool to look out onto.”

Their aging dog, Banker, grayed at the temples and muzzle, with his air of a retired cruise director, got up from under the table to check out the new dog that had moved in next door. Jack and the doctor got going about the Knicks until Vicki mimed the act of sawing, sawing off her place from their part of the table. She had learned the gesture from Jack. When she had his attention, she said, “I want you to see my friend Trina. It’s not like that—she’s a psychic.”

Vicki’s favorite subject after feelings was the paranormal.

“You know, I bribed the doctor here to go to a hypnotist to quit smoking,” she said. “If he’d have given it a chance, it might have worked.”

“The guy didn’t swing a watch on a chain,” the doctor told Jack. “He just talked to me really slowly. He bored me into a half-trance, something you know I can get at any goddamn dinner party.”