All you’ve got to do is tell her about this amazing roller-coaster ride you went on, how it started with a slow, steady climb that made every muscle in your body tense up with excitement and anticipation.
And that the coaster crested at the top of an incredible peak, where it teetered for one tantalizing moment before plunging over the edge, taking your breath away. You’ve never felt anything more exhilarating in your life and were shocked to hear yourself screaming with wild abandon with each breathtaking curve.
And when it was over, your entire body tingled and all you could think about was how much you wanted to experience it again…and again.
I set the magazine aside and sat there for a moment, waiting to see if I felt an overwhelming desire to find that special button of mine.
I was still waiting when Monk came out of Dr. Kroger’s office. Monk seemed unusually subdued. Come to think of it, so was I, considering I was supposed to be foaming at the mouth with uncontrollable lust and two men were there for the taking.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“Peachy,” Monk said, and walked past me out the door. I glanced at Dr. Kroger.
“You didn’t give him a tranquilizer, did you?”
Dr. Kroger shook his head. “Adrian has simply accepted the situation.”
“He has?”
“He’s in a good place emotionally right now.”
“How long do you think he’ll stay there?”
“Adrian knows how to reach me if he finds himself in crisis,” Dr. Kroger said.
“Every day is a crisis. Mr. Monk couldn’t sleep after watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps on TV the other night. He spent the next day on the phone with the studio trying to convince them to add another step to the title.”
“Don’t worry about Adrian. He’ll be fine.” Dr. Kroger smiled and patted me on the back. “Have a nice vacation.”
Monk lived in an apartment building on Pine, just a few blocks south of Dr. Kroger’s office, in a homey neighborhood that had somehow avoided being stripped of its natural charm and upscaled beyond affordability like the rest of the city.
Since he lived so close by, Monk didn’t wait for me to drive him home. Instead he gave me a dismissive little wave and started trudging sadly up the hill on his own.
Fine, I thought. Be that way. Walk home. Be a petulant child. I don’t care.
But the truth was, I did care. I felt a deep stab of guilt and cursed myself for it. I refused to feel bad about needing some time to myself or for supporting my best friend on her wedding day.
And what did I have to feel guilty about anyway? I was Monk’s employee and his friend, but that was it. I wasn’t responsible for him.
I wasn’t taking my daughter with me, and she wasn’t upset. Julie was happy for me, and for Candace, and while she would have liked to visit Hawaii, she didn’t want to get behind on her schoolwork. And there was another reason she didn’t mind my going.
“We’re together all the time, Mom,” Julie said with a weariness only a put-upon adolescent can convey. “I love you, but sometimes it’s a little much. I really need a break.”
I’m sure there was some truth to that. Hey, I was a kid once myself. I knew how she felt. But there was more to it than that. She was looking forward to spending a week with her grandmother. Not only does my mom let Julie stay up late and eat whatever she wants, but they love to go shopping together. Mom doesn’t get up to San Francisco very often and has a notorious open-checkbook policy where her only granddaughter is concerned. I was sure I’d come back to find a closetful of new clothes in Julie’s room. Maybe even a pony.
I figured if my twelve-year-old daughter could handle my going away for a few days, Adrian Monk certainly could. He was a grown man. He’d survive without me around to hand him disinfectant wipes.
Well, he might survive, but could he function?
Sure he could, I told myself. He’d functioned for a long time before he met me.
Of course, those were different times—at least, that was what Stottlemeyer explained to me.
Although Monk has always had obsessive-compulsive tendencies, he was once able to control them enough so that he could get a job on the SFPD and rise from a patrolman to homicide detective.
But then Monk’s wife, Trudy, a freelance reporter, was killed by a car bomb. She was the most stabilizing influence in his life. Without her, he was lost. His grief, combined with his inability to solve her murder, ate away at him. His phobias and compulsions took over his life. That cost him his badge, which was as dear to him, and as vital to his mental stability, as his wife.
I didn’t have compulsive tendencies, but I certainly knew how losing a spouse could tear you apart in ways you never thought possible. What saved me when Mitch was killed was my daughter. I focused entirely on the fact that I was the only parent she had left. That knowledge, that commitment, kept me firmly centered when the gale-force winds of grief threatened to sweep me away.
There were two things that saved Monk: Stottlemeyer threw some consulting work his way and, at Dr. Kroger’s insistence, Monk hired a full-time nurse to help him get back into the world again.
After a few years, his nurse abruptly moved to New Jersey one day and remarried her ex-husband. Monk had recovered enough by then to know he didn’t need a nurse anymore but that he still could use some help.
That was when he met me, but that’s
