“Trina has movie star clients,” Vicki said. “She looks like a movie star herself. She’ll come to your house.”

“I had an out-of-body experience before I left,” Jack said, playing with her. “And it was good,” he said, reflective,” ’cause I could help myself pack.”

Vicki stood up to clear the table.

“It looks like Vicki here is doing all the work,” the doctor pointed out.

Jack leaned back in his chair and drawled, “I have no problem with Vicki doing all the work.”

“Jack?”

“Vick?”

“I used to think a lot of you.”

She brought out a stack of dessert plates and a stringtied bakery box. “You want to do a line of pie?”

“Dogs heard you,” the doctor said. Banker had returned from telling off the neighbors for starting their car. He had with him the puppy from next door, a clumsy mutt named Boss that it had fallen to Vicki to train.

“He’s been gaining a pound a day,” Vicki said, admiring.

“He’s a miracle of cell division,” the doctor said, scooting him over to Jack.

Jack examined the pup’s chest and belly. “Where do the batteries go?”

Over bourbon-pecan pie, Vicki asked about the breakup and Jack tried to change the subject. When she prefaced a remark with “She wasn’t nice enough to me not to tell you this,” Jack could tell she was in his corner.

None of it was news to him, but he could hear what Vicki was saying. Not understand “where she was coming from”—he could literally hear her voice. Toward the end, he hadn’t been able to hear his wife. When he asked her a question and cared about the answer, he could not seem to keep his attention fixed on her. “What do you mean?” he would say to Alex and hope she would repeat the gist of it.

Jack didn’t have to say anything to Vicki because, at their feet, the puppy let pass audible gas.

“The bloom is off the rose,” Jack said.

“The plug is on the nose,” the doctor said. Both men waved their hands in front of their faces.

A beetle flew into Vicki’s cleavage; she stood to flick it out, and the doctor said you couldn’t blame it for trying.

Jack said, “What movie star does your psychic friend look like tomorrow?”

Jack woke to the sound of his car alarm. He went to the kitchen to look out on to the driveway and found Vicki leaning on a counter, laughing.

“You missed it,” she said. “Boss went over to pee on your tire? He lifted his leg and set off the alarm and toppled right over.”

Jack disconnected the alarm—Boss had hidden in shame—and went back inside the house for coffee.

Vicki was running a roll of masking tape up and down an arm of her cardigan, picking up fur. She handed it to Jack to do her back. She said, “Breakfast?”

“What’ve we got?”

“If we had some ham we could have ham and eggs—” Vicki said, and waited for Jack to join her on “if we had some eggs.”