Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

So his conscience was clear when he arrived at the funeral home and made his way into the viewing room, which was packed with people who must have been Heather’s relatives, coworkers, and former classmates, far more of them than he’d expected, given her frequent laments about being alone in the world. Sims took a seat in the last row of folding chairs, relieved to see that the little white coffin was closed. It appeared to be floating on a bed of flowers and stuffed animals; a framed photo of Kayla was resting on the lid, taken before she got sick, a little girl smiling sweetly at the world, waiting in vain for the world to smile back. The memorial service was mercifully short, just a gut-wrenching slide show followed by a generic eulogy, a young minister gamely theorizing that Kayla was an angel now, sitting on a heavenly throne beside a God who loved her so much he couldn’t bear to be apart from her for another day.

When it was over, Sims waited on line to pay his respects to the family. Heather was stationed in front of the coffin, greeting each mourner with a brave, heavily medicated smile, nodding intently at whatever the person said to her, as if she were memorizing a series of secret messages. She was sharing the place of honor with Kayla’s father, a hard-partying roofer who was two years behind on his child support. Sims moved quickly past the deadbeat dad, shaking his hand and offering a few mechanical words of condolence before turning to Heather, his throat constricting with emotion. She looked lovely in her black dress, almost radiant, though her face was dazed and slack with grief.

“Oh, God,” he said, opening his arms. “I am so sorry.”

He stepped forward for the hug — there was no doubt that they would hug, not after everything they’d been through — but instead of accepting the embrace, she shoved him in the chest, an angry, two-handed thrust that made him grunt with surprise.

“Don’t you touch me!” Her voice was shrill and indignant, trembling on the edge of hysteria. “Don’t you dare fucking touch me!”

Sims was too shocked to speak. He wondered if she’d mistaken him for someone else, an old boyfriend, maybe, a jerk who’d hurt her in some unforgivable way.

It’s me, he wanted to tell her. It’s Rick. Dr. Sims.

“You asshole !” She shoved him again, harder than the first time, like a schoolboy starting a fight. She looked almost feral, her face contorted with rage and revulsion. “Why’d you let her die?”

“I didn’t — ” Sims began, but he had no idea how to finish. “We did everything we could.”

“Oh, yeah.” She nodded in bitter agreement. “You did a great job.”

Heather turned toward the coffin, that adorable picture of Kayla, and lost her train of thought for a second or two. When she finally spoke, her voice was softer, more bewildered than angry.

“Really fucking awesome, Dr. Sims. Thanks for all your help.”

“Heather, please…” But by then he was already being led away by an apologetic man in a dark suit, an employee of the funeral home, who escorted him to the front door and ejected him, politely, from the premises.

THAT SAME evening, Sims attended a retirement party for Irene Pollard at the Old Colonial Inn. It was an anomaly — he rarely socialized with the admin staff and wasn’t all that friendly with the guest of honor, a grandmotherly receptionist whose incompetence was legendary around the Health Plan. But he was still a bit shaken by the incident at the funeral home and thought a drink or two might help wash away the bitter taste in his mouth.

The party broke up early, but Sims was detained on his way out by Eduardo Saenz, a gay physical therapist who’d helped him with a shoulder problem a couple of years earlier. Eduardo greeted him with boozy enthusiasm and invited him to share a pitcher of margaritas with some colleagues who’d relocated to a booth in the back room. Sims accepted without hesitation — he still wasn’t ready to go home — and was delighted to discover that the colleagues in question were Olga Kochenko and Kelly Foley, two of his most attractive coworkers. Sims didn’t know either of them very well, but they welcomed him like an old buddy, skipping right past the small talk and inviting him into their conversation.

“We were just talking about threeways,” Kelly informed him from across the table. She was an athletic, short-haired blonde, a nurse practitioner from Cardiology. “There’s a little difference of opinion.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sims nodded sagely, as though he were an expert on the subject. “What’s the problem?”

“Kelly doesn’t like them,” said Olga, a pharmacist whose short skirts and ridiculously high heels made her a frequent topic of lunchtime conversation among the male doctors of Sims’s acquaintance. “She thinks they’re tacky.”

“I never used that word,” Kelly protested. She had the planet Saturn tattooed on the inside of her right forearm, and a pink star outlined in black on the back of her left hand. “I’m just over it, you know? There’s too much to keep track of.”

“Girl, you gotta learn to multitask,” Eduardo told her.

“I can walk and chew gum,” Kelly assured him. “It’s the other people I’m worried about. All those arms and legs flailing around. I’m sick of getting kicked in the face.”

“I’ll tell you what I hate,” Olga volunteered. She was sitting next to Sims, wearing a low-cut peasant blouse that revealed a hint of cleavage, just enough that he felt gallant for averting his gaze. “When you never even signed up for a threeway? Like a few weeks ago, I went home with this hot girl from my Zumba class? We’re in her bedroom, just getting started, and the next thing you know there’s this naked bodybuilder dude standing in the doorway, stroking his dick and filming us with his iPhone. I’m like, Hello? Who the fuck are you? And she’s like, Oh, that’s Benjamin. I hope you don’t mind if he joins us. ”

Kelly rolled her eyes and said she’d been there, more than once. Eduardo wanted to hear a little more about Benjamin, but Olga turned her attention to Sims, sizing him up with a playful expression. She had a cute, slightly doughy face that she spiced up with dramatic eye shadow and long fake lashes.

“What about you, Doctor? What’s your professional opinion?”

“About threeways?” Sims made a slow motorboat noise with his lips. “You’re asking the wrong guy. I’m married with six-year-old twins. These days it’s pretty much a miracle if I get a two-way.”

Olga laughed and touched her glass to his. “You’re funny.”

Sims figured they’d move on to a different subject, but they were just getting started. Kelly said she’d had her first threesome back in high school, when she got seduced by a couple whose toddler she was babysitting, which meant that she actually got paid for it. Olga claimed that she’d once started making out with her dental hygienist right in the middle of a cleaning, and that the dentist eventually wandered in and joined the fun. Sims kept saying, Come on, that didn’t happen, but what did he know? Just because he’d washed up on a sexual desert island, that didn’t mean everybody else was stranded, too, doomed to a lifelong diet of coconuts. Some people were living it up on the party boat, enjoying the big buffet.

“You did one together, right?” Eduardo asked.

“Oh, God.” Kelly hid her face in her hands. “That was a disaster.”

“You were fine,” Olga said. “It was totally my fault.”

“She got the giggles,” Kelly told Sims. “And then I got them, too, and we just couldn’t go through with it. The guy got so mad.”

“Who was he?” Sims wanted to know.