I’ll tell you how, vultures: I took the hidden key and went downstairs to Sam’s office the morning after the storm, and when I saw him there on the floor and remembered what I’d done—following him down the path, hitting him with the shovel—I panicked. I put on a pair of latex gloves and used the Visa card from his wallet to set up an account online. I locked him in his office and drove to Stor-Mor myself, entering with the PIN number that had been texted to his phone, which I fished out of his jacket pocket. I walked home in the freezing rain, through deserted streets, having no idea what I was going to do.
But then Annie led me to Stephen King, and just like that, I knew exactly what I needed to do: nurse Sam back to health myself and make everything right.
It all would have been fine if Sam hadn’t decided he was going to pick the lock on the door and go through my personal belongings, including my purple binders, never mind a person’s right to privacy.
I know he did it. The evidence was there, in the mess he left me to clean up. Binders ripped at the spine, overturned drawers, the restraining order that Linda’s son applied for—all jumbled together in the middle of the floor. If he would have let me, I could have explained.
It’s simple. Linda and I were friends, and she liked having me around. It was that meathead son of hers, making things out to be something they weren’t, suggesting something untoward in our relationship. I knew from day one that he didn’t like me—calling me Nurse Nightingale, which I didn’t understand until I looked it up. But it didn’t matter what he thought, because I wasn’t hired to take care of Hank. I was hired to take care of his mother from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. four nights a week. Linda Pennypiece, the kindest person in the world.
She’d had a stroke three months earlier, at the age of eighty-nine. She couldn’t speak, but I could see in her eyes how much she enjoyed our time together. On the nights she couldn’t sleep, we’d stay up late, watching reruns of Mary Tyler Moore. I’d feed her the individual-sized boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes the agency gave everyone who worked the overnight shift. She’d stare silently at the television, but I could sense the joy it brought her. Until Hank showed up and ruined everything. I swallow back the disgust, remembering the sight of him walking into the kitchen as I stood at the stove in Linda’s robe, scrambling eggs. I was fired within the hour.
See, Sam, I’d say. I told you there was a good explanation for that. Just like there’s a good explanation for the other big question I imagine is on your mind. How did I come to fill a binder full of facts about you? One word: fate.
The moment fate intervened on our behalf: A one-item list
The Bakery, just before lunch, the first Tuesday in April. I was inside the stall at the men’s room, wondering if I should complain that the tea I’d just finished wasn’t hot enough, and you were at the sink outside, talking on the phone about your fading dream of the perfect office space. I listened to the whole thing—the place you’d come from smelled of marijuana, and the realtor didn’t have anything else to show you. You said you were off to visit your mother, and I had no idea until I opened the door that it was you—Dr. Sam Statler, the brilliant therapist from the “Twenty Questions” profile I’d come across in the local paper, whose work I’d been obsessively reading. I didn’t have anything else to do, and so I decided to follow you in my car, up the mountain to Rushing Waters. I circled the parking lot while you sat in your luxury automobile, and that’s when the idea came to me, in a moment of divinity: I could give you the perfect office space.
Why would I do that? you ask. Because I’m a nice guy. Because I care about people, Sam, and I appreciated the work you did, helping others understand the trauma of their childhoods. So much so that I went home and made a flyer. It took me no more than thirty minutes to find your car parked behind the bank, where I stuck the flyer under your windshield. Lo and behold you called just minutes later.
And I did everything you wanted, Sam. Professional lighting. A self-flushing toilet. Organic paint. I even did the one thing you couldn’t do: I visited your mother. （Anyone with two eyes and a pair of binoculars could see that you stopped going inside soon after you moved to town.） There’s a volunteer application available at their website, and bingo! It sounded fun. I know they don’t like me there. I see the way people look at me, ignoring the suggestions I leave in the suggestion box, but I don’t care, Sam. Because I wasn’t taking your mother to bingo twice a week to please them. I was doing it to help you.