He crossed his arms over his chest. His voice grew wary. “So you have some… professional relationship with Doyle? And if I’m his friend, you can’t have a professional relationship with me? That’s the deal?”
“I can’t divulge the nature of my current professional relationships. I’m sure you respect that. You asked me for my help with something. Before I’m able to agree to that request, it’s my responsibility to be certain that there aren’t any impediments.”
“Impediments?”
It was a stupid word, born of my anxiety over what I was doing, the tightrope I was trying to cross. But I was stuck with it. “Yes, impediments.”
Bill looked at me as though my subterfuge was as transparent as glass. He said, “Last fall sometime. He told me he was going to list the house. That was the last time I talked to Doyle.”
A pad of graph paper. A pencil with a fresh eraser. A whole lot of conjecture.
The meeting with Bill Miller was over and I was busy trying to compute how much it would take to raise two adolescent kids in an overpriced neighborhood in an overpriced town in an overpriced world. I had one small child in a similarly overpriced neighborhood in the same overpriced town, so I could fathom a guess as to what it was costing Bill Miller to support his family in Boulder. Mortgage, property taxes, food, health insurance, car payments, some amount of recreation, teenage whims… hell, I hadn’t even considered any additional funds that Bill might try to set aside to fund his eventual retirement.
To the sum at the bottom of my sheet of graph paper, I added the approximate costs I’d already computed that it would take to maintain a schizophrenic wife in a gambling and resort town in another state, and somehow simultaneously support her extravagant serial wedding habit.
Total all those amounts, do some rough reverse income-tax calculations, and I would have a guess, admittedly shoddy, as to exactly how many pretax dollars Bill Miller would have to earn to possibly meet all his financial commitments. My conclusion? I was guessing that Bill Miller would need to earn three hundred thousand dollars a year, minimum.
One of the things therapists do every day is listen to people talk about personal things, things like their money. Over the years, hearing various patients discuss their salary ranges for this job and that job, I’d developed a pretty good sense of what kind of living people made doing what kind of work in Boulder County.
There was no way Bill Miller made three hundred grand a year as a district manager of a chain of retail drugstores. What did I think Bill Miller was paid? Low end? Eighty to a hundred thousand dollars. High end? One fifty. One eighty, tops.
Tops.
That was not enough to provide for the two households Bill was supporting, let alone enough to have anything left over for Rachel’s nuptial peculiarities, and certainly not at the rates that Reverend Howie charged.
Family money? It was possible that some trust fund somewhere or some generous recently dead relative had come to the rescue to cushion the Millers’ financial burdens. But Bill hadn’t alluded to anything about any family money softening his financial plight.
So where, I continued to wonder, was Bill Miller getting the money to support two households, not to mention to make all the payments to Canada and Reverend Howie, and to otherwise endow Rachel’s sundry bizarre wedding imperatives?
I didn’t know. But I was beginning to think that the answer was crucial.
Mallory says her dad is up to something.
I tossed my pencil onto the desk and watched it skitter across the oak and tumble to the floor.
With some sadness and a lot of resignation, I admitted to myself that I’d just crossed a serious ethical line. The meeting that I’d just completed with Bill Miller hadn’t been psychotherapy. I hadn’t met with him for his clinical benefit.
I’d met with him for my own purposes, whatever those really were.
48
Grace was usually all mine on Friday mornings, my day off. That morning Lauren was in a trial and Viv had a chemistry class from ten until noon. Viv had kindly agreed to watch Grace while I saw Bill Miller but I had to rush back home to pick up my daughter so Viv could get to class on time.
Grace and I often used our Friday time for outings or errands, but on cold winter mornings we sometimes tossed “usually” out into the snow and snuggled up inside with hot cider, good dogs, and a warm fire. And books.
The temperature had dropped into the single digits overnight and snuggling seemed like a marvelous plan. But my discomfort over Diane and Bob and Rachel and Mallory wouldn’t allow me that kind of leisure, so I covered my daughter in multiple layers of cotton, fleece, and Fiberfill, shuttled her out to the Audi, powered up the seat heater, and began motoring west around 9:30. Grace was a good traveler; she seemed cool with our inclement adventure.
In front of us the vertical planes of the Flatirons were draped in a thin fog, as though a designer had decided that a gauzy covering was just what the foothills needed that morning. As we angled closer to the hogbacks north of the city, tiny glistening crystals descended from the frozen mist. “Look, Gracie, it’s raining diamonds,” I said.
Gracie laughed. On Friday mornings, until she needed a nap, I was almost always funny.
I spent the next mile or so trying to explain the concept of triplets to my daughter. For a moment, I actually thought she got it. But when she started squealing, “Three me, three me,” I was pretty sure that she was still in need of a hands-on demonstration.
I hadn’t called Mary Black to tell her we were coming by, mostly because I thought she would tell me not to bother, but partly because I was ninety-nine percent certain I would find her at home and that announcing my visit in advance would give her time to get her thoughts in order, which was something that wasn’t necessarily in my best interest. The reason I was so certain I would find her home was that, considering the energy it took to get one small person out of the house in near-zero January temperatures, I thought it was a safe bet that Mary would need a damn good reason to layer up her three bundles of six-week-old joy to lug them outside.
Mary, her husband Gordon, an anesthesiologist, and their triplets lived in a sprawling contemporary ranch in a tony enclave off the Foothills Highway just south of the mouth of Lefthand Canyon. The house hadn’t been built for a family with three infants, and its out-of-town, almost-in-the-mountains location wasn’t the most convenient for schlepping multiple kids to pediatricians, preschool, and soccer. I wasn’t at all surprised to see a FOR SALE sign out front. Babies change things. They just do.
Triplets change everything.
Before I left the car I tried to check my voice mail for word from Raoul but I couldn’t get a cell signal in the mountain shadows. Yet another reason for parents of triplets to move closer to town.
I was relieved the Chinooks that the weather people had been forecasting hadn’t yet started blowing. Chinooks are fierce winter down-slope winds, cousins of California’s fabled devil winds, the Santa Anas. Chinooks warm as they descend from the tallest peaks of the Continental Divide, the gusts compressing and accelerating as they squeeze through mountain canyons before they ultimately rupture out of the foothills onto the communities of Colorado’s Front Range in fifty- to one-hundred-mile-an-hour bursts.
A wise man once said that there is definitely a place not to stand when an elephant has gas. In a similar vein, the mouth of Lefthand Canyon was one of the places not to linger in Boulder County during a serious joust with Chinooks.
It took Mary a moment to respond to the doorbell, but my guess was right-she was home.
“Alan, what a surprise.”
She looked surprised. That much was clear. Pleased? That would have been a stretch. Mary had a well-rounded son curled in each arm and the third member of the newly born trio was screaming somewhere in one of the back rooms of the house. Mary seemed inured to the wail.