If I added that amount to the amount that Reverend Howie told Raoul that Canada was paying him so that Rachel could attend weddings-I figured it was probably a similar amount, actually, another twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars a year-we were talking big money. Potentially very big money, since Canada was probably keeping an additional cut for his services. My gut instinct said that the total, fifty to a hundred thousand dollars annually, had to be more than someone in Bill Miller’s circumstances could afford.
Especially since we were talking after-tax dollars.
Bill tried to explain how he handled his generous allowance to his wife. “I make a good living. The company’s been good to me over the years. My career’s gone well. It would be better if I could make this living in Nevada, but I can’t. I consider myself fortunate. The kids and I cut some corners. We live simply. We manage. My car’s a lot older than yours.”
Bill had noticed my car? That gave me a little chill.
“Rachel’s not in treatment?” I asked.
“She’s not interested.”
“And you don’t use a home health care agency?”
“We’ve tried, but Rachel can be… difficult to deal with. Over the years, I’ve pieced something together, some… services that seem to work out. They meet her needs.” He smiled at me, just a little sheepish grin. “Is that it? Is that all that you needed to know?”
“No,” I said. “I have one more question. It’s similar to the first one I asked.”
“Shoot.”
“What is the nature of your relationship with the man who owns the house next door to yours?”
He nodded. “Doyle?”
I immediately knew that he’d been ready for that question; it was the one he’d been expecting from me all along. It wasn’t too surprising; Bill had twice spied me loitering on Doyle’s property. But I didn’t want to divulge the fact that I knew the name of the house’s owner, so I asked, “He owns the house to the north of yours?”
“Yeah, that’s Doyle. I barely know him.”
“Barely?”
“We were neighbors for… almost four years. But we weren’t close. He’s a loner, a single guy. He kept to himself. He’d be outside working; we’d say hi. That sort of thing. He invited me over once to look at his new waterfall, and his pond. Impressive. That’s probably the most time we ever spent together. He moved away before Thanksgiving, maybe even before Halloween. The house is vacant. But you know that.”
I noted the dig, but didn’t bite. “When’s the last time you spoke with him?”
“I’m having trouble understanding why that is any of your business.”
Although I knew that the reason Bill Miller was having trouble understanding why it was any of my business was because it wasn’t any of my business, I reiterated my dual-relationship concerns. Not too surprisingly, Bill seemed less satisfied by my explanation than he had been the first time.
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.