Paul’s Check Register

July 29, American Airlines, debit $274.98

Economy class plane ticket, ORD to DFW, August 12–14. His brother, Tyler, was marrying a woman named Sondra who was a chef in Dallas. Sondra told Paul that they’d met while waiting in line at the grocery store, Tyler complimenting her on the tattoo of a fork on her left index finger and the matching spoon on her right, but Tyler later told him that they’d met on the Web, which embarrassed Sondra. Paul thought the only thing that mattered was that they’d managed to meet at all. He wondered if the marriage would last beyond the first two years, if the hotel where he’d booked a room for the wedding weekend would be quiet and the bed firm enough, and what he would eat at their wedding reception. He was a vegetarian, and his brother liked to needle him about this “lifestyle choice,” as Tyler called it, always making a wry face as he said these words. Humans were supposed to eat meat, he argued. Look at his bicuspids— they were like fangs, weren’t they? Tyler’s were fang-like, yes, but Paul’s were not. The wedding would be catered by Sondra’s favorite mesquite barbecue pit, and Paul would eat bread and the side dishes, if a couple of them weren’t cooked in animal fat.

Tyler had asked him to perform Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise” during the wedding ceremony, which he was more than happy to do, but tuning his violin after the flight might take as long as an hour, and he’d need to practice the piece at length because he hadn’t played it in several years. His brother would probably still expect a gift from his and Sondra’s registry, too. Paul would get them a gift card for Macy’s, $100, which he hoped was enough to make him seem not-stingy. The travel expenses weren’t negligible either, but he didn’t think he’d get credit for these.

July 31, Walgreens, debit, $14.26

One box of Kleenex, a six-pack of Fiji water, and a bar of oatmeal soap for Paul’s downstairs neighbor, a woman in her seventies named Ruthann who had sprained her ankle the previous week. Over the last couple of years, he’d done other favors for her: changing the light bulb in her coat closet, pulling the refrigerator out from the wall so that her cleaning woman could mop the grime underneath it, hailing her a taxi cab in the middle of snow- and rainstorms. With a mischievous look, she liked to ask him questions he had no answers for. Why weren’t presidential candidates forced to take lie detector tests on national television during the debates? Was this the day that people would finally stop wasting so much time staring at their phones and look each other in the eye for a change?

The vanity plate on her rarely-driven Volvo read OLD CRANK, a joke of her husband’s that usually harvested merry honks from other drivers. When he died four years ago, she couldn’t imagine living without it, too.

August 2, Ck #1162, Dr. Mary Alice McCullough, $35 copayment

Dr. McCullough was almost too intimidatingly pretty to be Paul’s therapist. He could talk to her about his fear of marriage and fatherhood, or a recurring, murderous dream that featured a man who resembled Paul’s former violin instructor at the New England Conservatory, but he could never comfortably discuss with her his fear of impotence. Dr. McCullough looked to be at most thirty-five; she was green-eyed and black-haired, thin, with strong shoulders and a soft voice. She had come to Chicago from a coastal city in southern Ireland—Cork, Paul thought—but she wouldn’t answer questions about herself unless he slipped one in at the end of a session when he was gathering his messenger bag with its obscene Velcro shriek upon each opening, he standing before her with right hand extended, this the one time they touched during...