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briefcase down on a torn leather armchair and took out Mrs. Buckholdt's chart, which he would have read by now if he hadn't been in such poor shape this morning. After getting thoroughly drunk, he'd done the really smart thing of calling his ex-girlfriend, a woman in his pro27 gram he'd dated toward the end of their residency. They had gone out for six months, which, at the age of thirty-two, was the longest Frank had ever been with a woman. If he hadn't seen so many patients with romantic lives more desperate than his own, he might have considered himself abnormal. Anne had flown out from Boston a few times when he first got out here; he'd convinced himself that one day he would ask her to marry him.
    "Glad to hear you're still out there saving the world," she said, after he made a few comments he regretted now. She knew he'd come out here with the idea that he'd be given the freedom to practice the way he wanted to, which meant more time to talk with his patients. Wanting such a thing seemed almost renegade at this point in his profession, given the dominance of the biological psychiatry they'd been trained in, a regime Anne had never seriously questioned. They'd argued about it plenty, always ending with her calling Frank a romantic clinging to an old myth about the value of talk. But no words of hers could change the fact that Frank had instincts about what it meant to spend time with the people he cared for, and they involved more than picking a drug. He knew his patients sought someone to acknowledge what they were experiencing, and he knew he was good at it, better than most of his colleagues.
    At medical school, they all joked about the numbing: from four months spent dissecting the body of a dead man, cutting into his face and eyes, to seven hours clamping open a woman's chest, only to watch her expire on the table--
    whatever the particulars, it didn't take most people long. And 28
    then in residency, schizophrenics trembling in psychosis, addicts, manics, beaten children. Frank joked too. But he always felt odd doing it, as if it were a show to prove he was adapting like his peers. The fact was he still felt like a sponge, absorbing the pain of the people he listened to. Privately, he considered it the act of a certain kind of faith. Never having been a religious person, empathy had taken up the place in him belief might have in others.
    Trying to ignore his headache, he skipped over the internist's report in Mrs. Buckholdt's chart and went straight to the psych note: forty-four-year-old woman with no history of major mental illness in the family; first presented with depression following death of her eldest son, four years ago; two younger children, boy and a girl. When he scanned the margin indicating course of treatment, he saw how shoddily her case had been managed. A brief course of antidepressants, probably never finished, and since then nothing but benzos--
    sedatives--written as needed. No therapy. George Pitford, the shrink Frank had replaced, wasn't about to drive five hours round-trip for a meds consult, so he'd just kept calling in her refills. A cryptic line he'd scrawled at the bottom of the page read, Injury may be a factor.
    "My apologies for not greeting you at the door," Mrs. Buckholdt said, entering the living room, hands tucked in her pockets. She was an attractive woman, slender, taller than her husband, in better physical health, though she certainly looked older than forty-four. She wore tailored black pants, a bit faded, a white rayon shirt, a silver necklace. He'd been expecting a disorganized person, some kind of shut-in. 29
    The woman before him seemed almost out of place here, in this house out in the middle of nowhere.
    She closed the door to the kitchen, turned a key in the latch to lock it, then crossed the room to join him.
    "I'm sorry you had to come all this way," she said. "In this awful heat. Would you like a drink? Water perhaps, or a lemonade?"
    "I'm fine for now," he said,