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caught in the corners of renovated houses, between a drive-in Dairy Barn store and a stucco ranch given over to card reading and TV repair.
    He was a GP, but according to my mother approached his profession with the pride and the disdain of a haughty artist. He wanted nothing to do with money, either taking it in or paying it out. He hired no nurse, no receptionist, no interior decorator to choose couches for his waiting room or paintings for his walls. He used the kitchen and the dining room of the old house for his office and examining room and lined the living room with unmatched stuffed or stiff back chairs. A handwritten index card on the front door told what time he’d be there, and patients simply arrived with their own magazines and ashtrays and waited their turn. He would stay for as long as it took to see everyone, sometimes letting patients into the dining room long after midnight.
    When my mother’s visit had ended, she had asked him if he would send her the bill. He seemed offended, she said, or embarrassed, and gruffly told her, “Six dollars.” He took out his wallet to make change, and when he saw that he didn’t have enough singles, made it five. He put the cash in his wallet and the wallet into his pocket, as if, my mother said, he would spend it at the grocery store that very evening. As he probably had.
    What his intentions in all this were, no one was sure. A kind of purity, I suppose—medicine alone, medicine as it might have been in older, simpler days of the American frontier, or in some suburban doctor’s dream of it. A one man effort at National Health. My mother had liked him, although the stark and dusty waiting room and especially the old yellow refrigerator she had stared at while he examined her had startled her a bit. When she went back to him a second time, every chair in the living room was taken and people were standing out on the porch. She had me and my brother with her then and had neither the time nor the endurance to wait. She went on to another doctor, one with a motherly nurse receptionist and an appointment calendar and a collection of his own paint-by-number oils on the bright walls, and never returned to Dr. Slater again.
    I suppose it’s possible that his other patients did the same, as the low fees and the down-home feeling gradually lost their novelty or as the doctor’s obvious lack of prosperity began to seem to them a reflection of his skill. Or maybe his scorn of paperwork got him in trouble with the IRS or the AMA or the local hospital. Perhaps his mad wife drove the patients away; or his own wistful and deliberate pursuit of a time that had never been his to begin with had finally appeared even to him as another kind of madness. It hardly matters. His back went out and his operation went haywire. His practice ended.
    On the night of the fight, the night Rick came to claim her, he was home with his eldest daughter, who had just returned from her job at the store. She answered the phone, still in her stockings and dress, her name tag still pinned to her collar. He got up slowly, a big man with pale, heavy limbs. He leaned against tables and held on to walls as he made his way to the telephone. His daughter put out her arm for him. Her pity at times like this seemed cloying.
    More trouble, he must have thought when he heard his boy’s muffled, sullen voice. More bad luck. At some time during that night he must have thought it overwhelming, the bad luck, the series of mistakes that plagued his family. His wife on the edge of some hotel bed in a strange city, her pocketbook on her lap, her eyes passing over him. His youngest daughter already trapped in a bitter, childish marriage; the middle one pregnant and broke, on the road somewhere with her brute; the oldest steeped in a dutiful loneliness. And now his intense and restless son playing out some B-movie drama over the love of a skinny girl.
    He must have wondered at some point if they drew the bad luck to them, even