“I’m used to it,” she said, her back to me as she scrounged around for her things.
“You must meet a lot of people like Mr. Monk.”
She sighed wearily. “There’s nobody like Adrian.”
She’d done it again. She’d called him Adrian. There was something about the way she said it, with her strong New Jersey accent, that gave me a pang of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. I suddenly had an ominous inkling what the explanation for her familiarity with him might be.
“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 I split up again. Benji and I moved back here.”
“Why San Francisco?” I asked. “Why not go back to New Jersey?”
“Because I knew I couldn’t hold down a job and raise Benji alone. I needed help and my sister lives here.”
“I do, too,” Monk said.
“I know that, Adrian,” Sharona said. “But you need more help than you’re capable of giving.”
“You were there for me,” Monk said. “I would have been there for you. I still can be.”
I wanted to grab him and shake him hard.
Why was he mewling like that? Sharona walked out on him. Where was his anger? He sounded like it was all his fault that she left. And then it hit me that he probably thought that it was.
“I was going to call you, Adrian. Honestly I was. But I just wasn’t ready for you in my life again. Things are too complicated as it is.”
I took some comfort in that.
“What drove you and Trevor apart this time?” Monk asked.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He murdered someone,” Sharona said.
Everyone within earshot who wasn’t Sharona gasped at once. That would be me, Monk, Julie, and an orderly who happened to be walking by.
I don’t know what was more astonishing: that Sharona’s husband was involved with a murder or that she didn’t call Monk, the world’s best homicide investigator, about it the day Trevor was arrested.
Sharona gave the orderly a look and he hurried along to spread the gossip to the rest of the hospital staff.
“Your husband is accused of murder,” I said, “and you still didn’t call Mr. Monk?”
Sharona turned to him. “You couldn’t have helped me.”
He nodded.
Why did he nod? He couldn’t possibly have agreed with her. Monk was insecure about everything except his detective skills. On that point, he was in complete agreement with everyone else that he was the best of the best at solving homicides.
She had to know that, too. But I decided to rub it in anyway, if only to get a rise out of Monk.
“Solving murders is what Mr. Monk does,” I said. “It’s like a superpower.”
“He found out who killed the firehouse dog for me,” Julie said. “He’s a great detective.”
“I know he is, honey, but it wouldn’t make any difference this time,” Sharona said to Julie, beginning to apply the wet strips to her left arm, “because my husband is guilty.”
“Did he confess?” I said.
“Of course not,” Sharona said. “Trevor says he’s innocent. He always says that and he never is. That’s why I divorced him before.”
“Maybe he’s telling the truth this time and you’ve abandoned him when he needs you the most,” I said. “You seem to be pretty good at that.”
“Maybe,” Sharona said, ignoring my cheap shot. “But I’ve run out of trust where he’s concerned. I won’t put myself or Benji through the ordeal of a trial. I’m done. I never should have remarried him.”
“So now you’re living in San Francisco again and working in a hospital,” Monk said, finally speaking up to state the obvious. “How can you stand it?”
“It’s a job,” Sharona said.
“Is it better than the one you had?” he said.
“You mean with you?”
“Don’t you miss it?” he asked.
“My life has changed, Adrian.” Sharona glanced at me, and then back at him. “And so has yours.”
That was the end of the conversation, at least between us adults.
Sharona made some small talk with Julie about school as she completed the casts and let them dry. Then Sharona cut the left cast off with a plaster saw and fitted it on her arm again with Velcro tabs. She put Julie’s arms into slings, adjusted the straps and then admired her handiwork.
“How’s that look to you, Adrian?” Sharona asked.
“Balanced,” Monk said.
“Wow, there’s no higher praise than that in your book,” Sharona said. “That may just be the nicest compliment you’ve ever given me.”
I resented Monk for making my daughter even more uncomfortable than she had to be and I resented Sharona for just being there.
“Can I play soccer next weekend?” Julie asked.
“With your arm in the cast?” Sharona said.
“Arms,” Monk corrected.
“Why not?” Julie said. “You’re only supposed to use your feet, not your hands.”
“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Sharona said. “But I like your attitude. You’re tough.”
“I’m a Teeger,” Julie said. “We don’t give up.”
I don’t know whether Julie was sending a message to Sharona on my behalf, but I loved her for it anyway.
“I believe you.” Sharona looked at me. “It was really nice meeting you both. I’m just sorry it was under these circumstances.”
“Me, too,” I said.
Sharona turned to Monk. “It was good to see you, Adrian. You seem to be doing just great.”
“I was,” Monk said forlornly.
I was so angry with Monk that I was tempted to leave him at the hospital. Let Sharona take him home if he missed her so much.
But in the end, I just walked out with Julie and he followed along with us to the car, like nothing had ever happened. Like we hadn’t just run into his former assistant and he hadn’t practically offered her my job in front of my face.
How could he be so insensitive? So selfish?
So Monk?
We rode in silence. Nobody said a word.
I dropped him off at his house and sped off, not even waiting to see if he got to his door. He was a grown man; if he couldn’t handle the journey from the sidewalk to his living room, too bad for him.
“Are you angry?” Julie said.
“What makes you say that?” I snapped.
“You’re grimacing and your face is red,” she said. “Is it because of me? Because of the medical bills?”
“No, dear, of course not,” I said, consciously willing the edge out of my voice. “I’m not mad at you at all. You’ve been amazing. I am so proud of you.”
“What for? It’s no big accomplishment to break your wrist.”
“For being so brave and strong and mature. You were very considerate with Mr. Monk when he wasn’t very considerate with you.”
“That’s not true, Mom. Mr. Monk is scared of hospitals but he came with us anyway,” she said. “He must really care about me.”
“He does,” I said.
“Now he knows that I care about him, too.”
“That’s why I’m so proud of you,” I said. “You’re worrying about how other people feel at a time when you should only be worrying about yourself.”
“There is no such time,” she said.
“Who says?” I asked.
“I do,” she said. “It’s something I decided.”
I’d spent so many years teaching my daughter how to think, but I’d missed the moment when she’d started thinking for herself. My little girl was growing up into someone with her own beliefs and opinions about life.
When had that happened? And why was it bringing tears to my eyes? I was turning into an emotional wreck.
“You still haven’t told me what you’re mad about,” Julie said.
“I’m mad at the Killer Cleats for playing so rough. I’m mad that you got hurt. And I’m mad that both of your arms are in casts when only one of them needs to be.”
“And you’re mad that Sharona came back.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “that, too.”
“If you lose your job,” Julie asked, “will Mr. Monk still come to see us?”
“I hope so,” I said.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mr. Monk Can’t Decide
When we got home, I took the extra cast off Julie’s left arm, made us both grilled cheese sandwiches and gave her a couple painkillers. She went to bed early that night and was asleep within a minute. I went to bed early, too, but sleep didn’t come as easily for me.
Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants Page 3