James had been in the car for an hour and eleven minutes staring at his feet under the steering wheel. It was snowing outside, and he had turned the car off. It was quiet and James felt he was drowning in loneliness. He did not remember what he had been thinking about. James had pulled on surgical gloves after he had scrubbed for surgery and tied on a surgical mask and had walked into the operating room in a cloud that morning. The head nurse came toward him brusquely, agitating her hands, shaking her head. She corralled him backwards into the scrub room. The others turned to look. “You need a surgical cap,” the nurse had repeated, but James did not hear her. He watched the room of people blurred in the mist. As he stepped backwards retracting in fear from the nurse who came toward him, as if she were a vicious animal, he hit his head on the door. It was then he heard the word, “cap.” Jesus, he had forgotten the surgical cap. He would not be written up over a one-time occurrence, but, Jesus, he had forgotten a fundamental part of prepping. He could feel his colleagues strain to talk with him.

“How are things? You haven’t been in surgery for weeks. What’s going on?”

It was the mortgage. He had been thinking about the mortgage as he scrubbed. He had been thinking about the divorce, and when the nurse came at him, she had looked like a charging wildcat. In the car numbers of his halved retirement fund mixed with the tuition for school for Jake and Ella. He was barely able to hold himself together. Surgery was a challenge and it frightened him to feel the earth quaking beneath him at all hours of the day. Rose was not at home. She left a message saying she was going to a friend’s cabin. She left no name for the friend or time for her return. Her affair had stunned him, though he knew he could only accept it and go through with mediation next week. It was appallingly simple to dismantle his life.