Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

“Well, I must say, you did a very thorough job.” Her voice is croaky and frail, but not as angry as I expected. “I thought I was dreaming when I looked out the window.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I’m gonna help you clean it up.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That would be nice.”

I use the rake at first, but it doesn’t feel right, so I put it down and follow Mrs. Scotto’s example, stooping and snatching up the leaves with my bare hands. It’s a little gross at first, but pretty soon it starts to feel normal.

“My nephew’s supposed to pick me up at noon,” she tells me. “I’m invited to his house for Thanksgiving dinner. But I guess I’ll have to cancel.”

“You go ahead,” I tell her. “I can finish up on my own.”

“That’s okay.” Mrs. Scotto’s face looks younger when she smiles. “I don’t like my nephew very much.”

“We’re going to my uncle’s,” I say. “But not until four o’clock.”

“Isn’t there a football game today?” she asks.

I nod and leave it at that. There’s a game, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me. The sun gets brighter and warmer as we work. My back starts to hurt, but I do my best to ignore the discomfort. I try not to think about anything but the leaves on the ground, and the slow progress we’re making, me and Mrs. Scotto, getting everything back to the way it’s supposed to be.

IN THE TURBULENT, LONELY MONTHS that followed the collapse of his marriage, Dr. Rick Sims became obsessed with the blues. It started simply enough; he was driving home from work, half-listening to one of the classic-rock stations preset into the SiriusXM unit on the Audi A4 he was pretty sure he could no longer afford, when a song snagged his attention — “Born Under a Bad Sign,” not the original and far superior Albert King version that he would later come to love, but the white-bread cover by Cream. Its main riff sliced through the fog of his guilt and shame, a simple, plodding phrase that repeated itself with slight variations throughout the song:

Hey, he thought, though he hadn’t picked up a guitar in years. I bet I could play that.

When he got home — home being the grim condo he’d rented after Jackie had evicted him from their comfortable, five-bedroom house on Finnamore Drive — he unearthed his old Yamaha acoustic from its dusty case, tuned it as best he could, and started fooling around on the low strings, trying to re-create the riff from memory. Something wasn’t right, so he turned to the Web for assistance, discovering a treasure trove of helpful links: tablature sites, free lessons on YouTube, and a vast archive of live-performance videos, not just King and Clapton and Hendrix tearing it up, but a bunch of random dudes playing along with the record in their bedroom or basement. Some of these amateurs were dishearteningly good, but others could barely play a note. It was like some weird form of masochism, the way they flaunted their ineptitude, inviting the cruelty of anonymous commentators:

no offense but you suck ass

Worst. Guitar. Player. Ever.

Hey not bad for a deaf retard

Holy S**t that was AWFUL!!!

Jimi just choked on his vomit again.

Sims hated to admit it, but he took a shameful pleasure in the abuse, watching the poor saps take their punishment. Better you than me, brother. It was a tough world out there, and you were a fool to reveal your weakness. He wondered if maybe these losers were so desperate for human contact that insults from total strangers seemed like a step in the right direction, an upgrade from complete invisibility. In any case, it was oddly encouraging to see the whole spectrum of human talent laid out like that, to discover that, even now, rusty as he was, he was nowhere near being the worst guitar player in the world.

It was after ten o’clock when he closed the laptop and stowed away the Yamaha, which meant that he’d been working on that one simple song for almost three hours. His fingertips hurt and his mind was buzzing, but it was a healthy change of pace, doing something constructive instead of pining for his kids, or dozing off in front of some lame TV show, or masturbating to obscure fetish porn that made him feel dirty and hollow when he was finished. He ate a sandwich, watched the news for a bit, and then went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Sims usually had trouble sleeping in the condo — the mattress was too soft, and he could hear the traffic on Route 27 — but that night he drifted off right away, a weary blues riff echoing in his head like a lullaby.

JUST A few weeks earlier, Sims had been an enviable man, a proverbial pillar of the community — husband, father, homeowner, soccer coach, churchgoer, Audi driver, pediatrician. And now he was something else — an outcast, an adulterer, an absentee dad, the costar of a sordid workplace scandal. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d devoted his entire life to constructing the first identity; it had been erased overnight, on account of a single, inexplicable transgression. He wanted to say it wasn’t fair, but he’d stopped believing in fairness a long time ago. As far as he could tell, it didn’t matter who deserved what: people got what they got and they pretty much had to take it.

On the morning of his life-altering fuck-up, Sims had attended the funeral of a former patient, a five-year-old chatterbox named Kayla Ferguson, who’d been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer — diffuse pontine glioma, to be exact — at the ripe old age of three and a half. Over the course of her illness — long after he’d referred the case to a pediatric neuro-oncologist — Sims had stayed in close touch with Kayla’s mother, fielding her distraught calls at all hours of the day and night. He hadn’t just briefed Heather Ferguson on her daughter’s increasingly dire prognosis, translating Dr. Mehta’s dense (and heavily accented) medical jargon into plain English, he’d become her friend and advisor, listening patiently to marathon rants about her worthless ex-boyfriend, her heartless boss, and her implacable insurance company, offering sympathy and encouragement when he could, doing his best to keep her spirits up through the long and punishing ordeal. Toward the end, she called so frequently that Sims’s wife started to get annoyed, and even a bit jealous, suggesting more than once that he might not have been quite so attentive if Heather Ferguson had been a forty-year-old in roomy mom jeans rather than a twenty-three-year-old single mother who just happened to be “cute like a cheerleader,” which was how Sims had described her in a regrettable moment of candor.

“She’s upset,” he would say. “The least I can do is listen.”

“At two in the morning?”

“Come on, Jackie. Her daughter’s dying.”

Her daughter’s dying. That was his trump card and he played it for all it was worth. Because it was true, of course, but also because Jackie was right: Sims was smitten. He was having all kinds of crazy feelings for Heather Ferguson — he wanted to cook her dinner and pay her medical bills and take her to a luxury spa for a weekend of pampering. He wanted to drive to her house in the middle of the night and make love to her — slowly and tenderly, to distract her from her pain — and then hold her while she cried, and he needed to remind himself every chance he got that it was impossible, because he was a doctor and her daughter was dying. It hadn’t been easy — one night she’d called from her bathtub at three in the morning, midway through her second bottle of wine — but Sims had kept his urges in check, always conducting himself in a professional and ethically responsible manner.