Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

“Used to be he had good and bad days,” Mike said. “But lately it’s more like bad days and worse days.”

Sims didn’t mind the delay; it gave him a standing excuse to stop by the store on his way home and ask if there was any news. Mike always seemed to happy to see him and was always up for a little jamming.

“You’re getting a lot better,” he’d tell Sims. “You must be practicing.”

It gradually turned into a regular thing, three or four nights a week. They’d grab a burrito from the truck, talk a little while they ate, then retire to the Inner Sanctum to play those amazing guitars through those vintage amps, as loud as they wanted. The store was pretty well soundproofed, and there were no neighbors to disturb in any case.

“Check this out,” Mike would say, and he’d launch into the intro of “Hey Joe” or “Texas Flood,” whatever song they’d decided to work on. “Is that sweet or what?”

Mike was a talented musician — he’d been playing in bands since he was twelve — and a patient, generous teacher. He guided Sims through a host of classic tunes — “Mannish Boy,” “You Shook Me,” “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” — stopping when necessary to expound on any theoretical or technical issues that arose. The amount of new information was overwhelming at times — the major and minor pentatonics, the chord inversions, the double stops and slurs and whole-note bends — but it was exactly what Sims needed, a musical boot camp, an intensive, ongoing tutorial in the art of blues guitar. He tried to formalize the arrangement a couple of times, offering to pay the going rate for lessons, but Mike wouldn’t hear of it, though he did let Sims buy the burritos and keep the mini-fridge stocked with beer.

When they were done, they would sit around for another hour or two, listening to Roy Buchanan and Buddy Guy and Hubert Sumlin, marveling at the precision and raw passion these artists brought to the music, and that indefinable something that made each one unique.

“Holy shit!” Mike would say when something really great happened, a blinding solo run, or a single, piercing note at the crucial moment. He sounded incredulous, even a little pissed off. “Motherfucker!”

It was usually pretty late by the time Sims left, and he always felt a little melancholy heading out to his car, partly because the thought of going home to the condo depressed him, but mainly because he felt bad for Mike, who wasn’t going anywhere. For the past six months, he’d been living in the store, sleeping on a couch in the back office, showering at a gym down the road. Talk about the blues, he said. He’d been out of work for two and a half years, ever since he got laid off from his IT job when the market imploded and everything went south.

His marriage fell apart a year later, though he insisted it had nothing to do with his employment situation. The real deal-breaker was the Chester A. Arthur facial hair he’d decided to cultivate in an attempt to cheer himself up. He thought his new sideburns-and-mustache combo looked pretty cool, but his ex-wife begged to differ. She said it creeped her out and refused to have sex with him until he got rid of it. Sims didn’t say so, but he could see her point. Mike’s muttonchops were bushy and reddish gray, with a disconcertingly pubic texture, and the pointy tips extended all the way to the corners of his mouth.

“What happened to the mustache?” Sims asked.

“I got rid of it,” Mike replied. “As a peace offering. But that wasn’t good enough for Pam.”

“You really got divorced because of your sideburns?”

Mike made an ambiguous bobbing motion with his head.

“We had some other problems,” he admitted.

“Did you ever go to counseling?”

“We didn’t have the right insurance. But I don’t think it would’ve helped much.”

Sims was curious because he and Jackie had recently tried couples counseling themselves. Jackie kept insisting that Sims had stopped loving her because she’d gained so much weight during pregnancy and hadn’t been able to lose it. In her mind, that was the key to everything — the reason why their sex life was so unrewarding, the reason why he never listened to a word she said, and the reason he’d fallen in love with Heather Ferguson, who was so much younger and thinner than she was. Sims kept trying to tell her that it wasn’t the extra weight that bothered him, it was her complete lack of interest in sex, her attitude of pained resignation every time he touched her. She said she only acted like that because of the way he looked at her, the disgust that he didn’t even bother to conceal.

“I can’t forgive you for that,” she told him. “All those years you made me feel like shit.”

They gave up after three sessions when it became clear that talking about their problems just made things worse. It was a relief to throw in the towel, or at least it would’ve been if not for the boys, and the knowledge that his relationship with them was broken, too, that he’d never get a chance to be the kind of father he’d hoped to be.

He told Mike about their seventh birthday party, to which Jackie had grudgingly invited him. It wasn’t one of those fancy parties — no magicians or ponies or cotton-candy machines — just a bunch of neighborhood kids running around the yard in goofy hats, climbing on the cedar play structure that Sims had assembled from a kit three years earlier. He tried chatting with some of the other parents, but they treated him with strained, wary politeness, as if he carried some sort of communicable disease. But at least his boys were happy to have him there. Trevor, the bigger and sweeter of the twins, kept running over to Sims and jumping into his arms, the way he had when he was a toddler. Jason, smaller and more verbally adept, kept telling Sims that he loved him, though he also kicked him in the shins a couple of times, completely out of the blue, with what felt like genuine animosity. Both boys cried when Sims said good-bye — Trevor kept begging him to stay for a sleepover — and when Sims got back to the condo, he opened a bottle of bourbon and drank himself to sleep.

“Tell me it gets better,” he said. “Tell me I’m not gonna feel like crap for the rest of my life.”

Mike stroked his upper lip, the bare skin where his mustache used to be. He had two kids of his own, both in high school.

“It helps to play the guitar,” he said. “That’s the only thing that works for me.”

IN EARLY September, six months after they’d separated, Jackie invited Sims to Trastevere, the new Italian place in the center of town. He figured she wanted to talk about the divorce settlement, though as far as he knew, there wasn’t a whole lot left to discuss. According to Sims’s lawyer, the negotiations were substantively complete, just a few remaining i’s to dot and t’s to cross, nothing too momentous. The process had been surprisingly amicable; both he and Jackie had acted like responsible adults, keeping the best interests of the kids front and center, neither of them picking petty fights or making unreasonable demands. Sims had grumbled a bit about the custody arrangement — he would only get the twins on Wednesday and Saturday, and only Saturday would be an overnight — but Jackie had convinced him that the boys needed as much stability and continuity as possible during this difficult time of transition. And besides, he knew how much space they required, how much they loved kicking the soccer ball in the backyard and playing Wii sports on the big-screen TV in the basement rec room. He had no doubt that the condo would feel as cramped and depressing to them as it did to him.

Jackie was ten minutes late, and Sims almost didn’t recognize her when she finally showed up. She was wearing a black-and-gray dress that he’d never seen before, very flattering, but it was more than that; it was the confidence with which she approached the table, the enigmatic smile and subdued little wave she gave him when their eyes met. He’d been aware of subtle changes in her appearance over the past few months — she’d lost weight, colored her hair, done something new with her makeup — but he hadn’t registered the cumulative effect until she sat down across from him. This was a new Jackie, a far cry from the frumpy, defeated woman he’d been living with.