Show description

The face had looked like Jim’s, the hair lighter and longer, the face younger but no less intense. ‘‘Yes. Alex. First he dies on me, then all this. It’s the worst week in my whole life. I’m licked. I can’t handle it. I need help. ’’ She allowed herself to feel a slight sympathy. He had lost his brother. She, too, had a brother. She had experienced grief, also, that lightless sea that rolls in, drowning everything. But the truth was, almost every person who walked through the door and into her office had experienced misfortune.

And there? See how she’s compensating? She’ll never be pain free again. She needs another MRI. I think I missed something. ’’ So Nina called a last-minute follow-up deposition of this doc, and he muttered darkly about hip replacements and chronic pain syndrome down the road, which would probably necessitate expensive surgery. By the time he finished, opposing counsel was on the phone to his boss in some fifty-story building somewhere, whining for a bigger reserve. On the third day before the trial was to begin, this lawyer made a reasonable offer, which Nina, biting her fingernails even as she spoke on the phone, rejected.

Stumbling in the awful din, which now included shouting and howling magnified by the fine acoustics in the bathroom, she climbed a stool and reached for the smoke alarm, vividly remembering how her father, maddened by the noise, had once shot his off the wall. The remainder of the evening, what there was of it, was calm. By ten o’clock, somehow, Bob was in bed, his algebra mostly done. Month to month, like him, his room metamorphosed. The skateboarding and surfing posters on his bedroom walls had given way to Asian and African themes: Jackie Chan kickboxing his way out of a verdant rainforest and a couple of African masks he had found at a flea market.