“You’ve obviously had some experience with him before, ” I said, fishing.
“That’s one way of putting it,” she said, turning to look at him again, almost affectionately. “I used to have your job.”
And that’s when I saw the ID badge clipped to her uniform and my suspicions were confirmed.
Sharona was back.
CHAPTER THREE
Mr. Monk and the Reunion
From what I’ve been told, Monk has always had obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but after his wife, Trudy, was killed by a car bomb, they completely overwhelmed him. He couldn’t function at all. The police department forced him into taking an unpaid leave of absence and going into intensive, outpatient psychiatric care.
It became so bad for Monk that, in order to avoid institutionalization, he required a private nurse to administer his medication and help him put his life back together.
Sharona Fleming was that nurse.
She was a divorced mother who was raising a boy who was the same age as Julie. I know from personal experience that it couldn’t have been easy taking care of Monk at his worst and her kid at the same time. She must have reserves of strength that Arnold Schwarzenegger would envy.
Sharona not only got Monk off the meds and out of the house again, but she even coaxed him into consulting for the police on their trickiest homicide cases. Thanks to her, Monk gradually overcame his crippling grief and got a good-enough grip on his phobias that it seemed possible that he might get his job back again.
And then one Monday morning, without any advance warning, Sharona didn’t show up for work. She left a note informing Monk that she’d moved back to New Jersey and remarried her ex-husband, Trevor.
In Monk’s desperation to find a new assistant, he stumbled on me, a woman with no nursing experience whatsoever. I was a widowed mother working as a bartender in a real dive. But, for some reason, we got along.
Monk didn’t care that I wasn’t qualified, so I didn’t, either. All that mattered to me was that it was a better job than the one I had, I’d be home to put my daughter to bed each night and no more drunks would be vomiting on me.
At first, I felt like an actress brought in to replace a beloved character on a hit TV show. For months, it seemed as if I was constantly being compared by Monk, and everyone else in his life, to Sharona, and falling short.
But somehow Monk and I made it work.
It was hard, and it took time and effort, but Monk, Stottlemeyer and Disher eventually accepted me for who I was instead of expecting me to be a Sharona clone. I was even picking up a few things about detective work.
I finally had a job I was comfortable with, even competent at, and things were going more smoothly than ever.
And now Sharona was back, damn her.
I turned to Monk. He still hadn’t moved. She followed my gaze.
“He’s handling it much better than I thought he would,” Sharona said.
“He’s catatonic,” I said.
“He’ll snap out of it eventually,” she said. “Enjoy the quiet while you can.”
“I like Mr. Monk when he’s lively,” I said.
“Yeah, I noticed.” She gave me a look and carried her supplies over to Julie.
I followed along behind her. I was pissed off and couldn’t tell you exactly why. Maybe I could if I had her medical and psychological training. I looked at Monk. He was still staring, wide-eyed, at something none of us could see.
“Julie,” I said, “this is Sharona.”
My daughter’s eyebrows shot up. “That Sharona?”
Sharona smiled. “I’m infamous. I guess I should be flattered.”
“Don’t be,” I said.
Julie looked at me, making me feel self-conscious about my hostility. Sharona had never done anything to hurt me, at least not yet. But she’d certainly hurt Monk.
“You won’t feel a thing,” Sharona said to Julie. “Just keep your arm still and let me do all the work.”
She began to wrap Julie’s broken wrist with gauze.
“You never even said good-bye,” Monk mumbled. It was barely more than a whisper.
“Excuse me?” Sharona said, glancing at him. “You’ll have to speak up.”
“Good-bye,” Monk said, clearing his throat and rolling his shoulders. “You didn’t say it.”
Sharona kept her eyes on her work, running the gauze in the space between Julie’s thumb and index finger and around her wrist. “It was for your own good, Adrian. If I’d told you I was going to leave, you never would have let me go. You would have fallen apart.”
"I did,” Monk said.
“It could have been worse,” she said.
“No,” Monk said, “it couldn’t.”
“Adrian, we both know that isn’t true,” Sharona said. “You were ready for more independence and I had my own life to lead. I was doing us both a favor.”
“You lied to him,” I said.
“No, I didn’t,” she said and began applying strips of moist gauzy material over Julie’s wrapped-up wrist.
“You’re still in San Francisco,” I said. “You didn’t go to New Jersey.”
“I went,” Sharona said.
“Then what are you doing here now?” I said.
She gave me a cold look. “Not that it’s any of your business, but things didn’t go the way I planned. We were only back in New Jersey for a few months when a friend of Trevor’s in LA offered to sell him his little landscaping business: mowing lawns, trimming hedges, that kind of thing. Trevor wanted us to buy it. That meant using almost all our savings.”
Sharona finished with Julie’s right arm and began applying gauze to her left.
“But it seemed like a good business to me and I thought it could be a fresh start for all of us. So we bought the business and moved. Things went well for a while and then they didn’t. Trevor and
