“Aren’t you going to stick that in the car, Mr. Monk, or were you planning to leave it here?”
“You’re saying you want me to put the suitcase in your car?”
“You thought I was going to do it for you?”
“It’s your car,” he said.
“So?”
He shrugged. “I thought you had a system.” “My system is that you put your own stuff in my car.”
“But you took one of my suitcases and loaded it in the car,” he said.
“I was being polite,” I said. “I wasn’t indicating a preference for loading the car myself.”
“That’s good to know.” Monk picked up his suitcase and slid it in beside the other one. “I was respecting your space.”
I think he was just being lazy, but you never know for sure with Monk. Even if he were, I wouldn’t call him on it, because he’s my boss and I want to keep my job. Besides, it gave me the opening I was waiting for to address a touchy subject.
“Of course you were, Mr. Monk, and that’s really great. I appreciate that, because Julie and I have our own way of doing things that’s not exactly the same as yours.”
“Like what?”
Oh, my God, I thought. Where to begin? “Well, for one thing, we don’t boil our toothbrushes each day after we use them.”
His eyes went wide. “That’s so wrong.”
“After we wash our hands, we don’t always use a fresh, sterile towel to dry them.” “Didn’t your parents teach you anything about personal hygiene?”
“The point is, Mr. Monk, I hope that while you stay with us you’ll be able to respect our differences and accept us for who we are.”
“Hippies,” he said.
There was a word I hadn’t heard in decades and that certainly never applied to me. I let it pass.
“All I want is for the three of us to get along,” I said.
“You don’t smoke pot, do you?”
“No, of course not. What kind of person do you think I am? Wait—don’t answer that. What I’m trying to say, Mr. Monk, is that in my house, I’m the boss.”
“As long as I don’t have to smoke any weed.”
“You don’t,” I said.
“Groovy.”
And with that, he got into my car and buckled his seat belt.
2
Mr. Monk Moves In
I live in Noe Valley. It’s south of the much more colorful and well-known Castro District, with its energetic gay community, and to the west of the multiethnic Mission District, which is surely next in line to be conquered by the unstoppable forces of gentrification, Williams-Sonoma catalogs gripped in their fists.
Noe Valley feels like a small town, far away from the urban hustle and chaos of San Francisco, when, in reality, the bustling Civic Center, overrun with politicians and vagrants, is only about twenty blocks away, on the north side of a very steep hill.
When Mitch and I bought our place, Noe Valley was still a working-class neighborhood. Everybody seemed to drive a Volkswagen Rabbit, and all the houses were slightly neglected, in need of a fresh coat of paint and a little loving attention.
Now everybody is driving a minivan or SUV, there’s scaffolding up in front of every other house, and Twenty-fourth Street—a shopping district that was once lined with bakeries, diners, and barbershops—is overrun with patisseries, bistros, and stylists. But the neighborhood hasn’t gone completely upscale. There remain lots of homes in need of care (like mine), and enough little gift shops, secondhand bookstores, and mom-and-pop pizza places that Noe has managed to hold on to its quirky, Bohemian character (equal parts of which are now authentic and manufactured). It’s still very much a bedroom community, filled with young, struggling families and comfortable retirees with nary a tourist in sight.
On the drive down Divisadero to my house, Monk asked me to adjust my seat so it was even with his. I explained to him that if I did that, I wouldn’t be able to reach important things like the gas pedal, the brakes, and the steering wheel. When I suggested instead that he move his seat, he ignored me and began fiddling with the passenger’s-side mirror so it was tilted at the same angle as the mirror on the driver’s side, which I’m sure he figured would compensate for the natural imbalance created by the uneven seats.
I don’t get the logic either. That’s why I keep a bottle of Advil in my glove compartment at all times. Not for him, of course. For me.
When we got to my little Victorian row house, I let Monk get his own suitcases out of the car while I rushed inside for one last look around for things that might set him off. It’s not like he hadn’t visited my place before, but this was the first time he was staying there for more than an hour or two. Little things that he might have been able to summon the willpower to overlook before might become intolerable now.
Standing there in my open doorway, looking at my small living room, I realized my house was a Monk minefield. The decor is what I like to call thrift-shop chic, the furniture and lamps an eclectic mix of styles and eras. There is some Art Deco here and a little seventies chintz there, because I bought whatever happened to catch my eye and meet my meager budget. My approach to interior design was to have no approach at all.
In other words, my entire house, and my entire life, was the antithesis of Adrian Monk. There was nothing I could do to change that now. All I could do was open the door wide, welcome him in, and brace myself for the worst.
So that’s exactly what I did. He stepped in, surveyed the house as if for the first time, and smiled contentedly.
“We made the right decision,” he said. “This is much better than a hotel.”
It was the last thing I ever expected him to say. “Really? Why?”
“It feels lived-in,” he said.
“I thought you didn’t like things that were lived-in,” I said.
“There’s a difference between a hotel room that’s been continuously occupied by thousands of different people and a home that’s . . . ” His voice trailed off for a moment. And then he looked at me a little wistfully and said, “A home.”
I smiled. In his own way, that may have been the nicest thing he’d ever said to me. “Let me show you where you’ll be staying, Mr. Monk.”
I led him down the hall, past Julie’s closed door, which had a big, hand-drawn, yellow warning sign taped to it that said: PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. STAY OUT. KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING. Since it’s usually just the two of us in the house, the sign struck me as adolescent overkill. I had a sign like that taped to my door, too, when I was her age, but I had brothers to worry about. She had only me. Below that sign, Julie had also taped up a diamond-shaped DANGER! HAZARDOUS WASTE placard that she’d found somewhere.
Monk glanced at the placard, then at me. “That’s a joke, right?”
I nodded.
“It’s very humorous.” He tried to chuckle, but it came out sounding more like he was choking. “Do you confirm it periodically?”
“Confirm what?”
“That it’s a joke,” he said. “Children can be very mischievous, you know. When I was eight, I once went a whole day without washing my hands.”
“You’re lucky you survived.”
Monk sighed and nodded his head. “When you’re young, you think you’re immortal.”
I gestured to the room beside my daughter’s. “This is our guest room.”
Actually, until the night before it had been our junk room, where we stored all the clutter we couldn’t fit into the rest of the house. Now it was all temporarily jammed into my garage.
Monk took a few steps into the room and regarded the furnishings. There was a full-size bed, the first one Mitch and I ever bought, and the walls were decorated with some cheaply framed sketches of London, Paris, and Berlin landmarks that we bought from street-corner artists when we eloped to Europe. The dresser was a garage-sale find with one missing drawer knob, a flaw I hoped Monk wouldn’t notice but knew that he would. It was his astonishing powers of observation that made him such a great detective. He could probably tell by glancing at the sketch of Notre Dame if the artist was left- or right-handed, what he ate for lunch, and whether or not he smothered his elderly grandmother with a pillow.