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call so much, not to go out there for a while. That she needed to get on with her life.”
    Marty raised his eyebrows and nodded. The eyebrows and the nod were a cinch to translate. Well, she probably does, doesn’t she?
    “I told her I understood. That I should probably get on with my life too.”
    “You said that?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did you mean it?”
    He’d thought about that.
    The first time he and Ann had separated three months ago he thought he’d go crazy. He could get through his workday all right but after that all he wanted to do was go home and drink. Which most nights is what he did.
    He called her constantly, Vermont to California, every night while he was only on his second or third vodka and still sober enough to make some sense. He guessed she’d heard his pain and maybe still had some hopes for the two of them, that he still might eventually work out his problem, his unwillingness to commit to her and her daughter Chrissie full-time—and finally, last month, she suggested he come out again and visit.
    He had some vacation time coming.
    He’d jumped at the chance.
    It was some vacation.
    It was all of two days before everything surfaced again.
    “Yeah, I think I did mean it. I think it finally got through to me, the kind of hell I was putting her through, six years of me coming and going all the time. Here two days and gone five, here three days and gone four. She went all the way to California to get away from that. She said things to me like, Chrissie and I are always saying to each other, when Joe comes out we’ll do this, we’ll do that. We’ll go to Disneyland. Always putting things off because they like doing things with me but the point is they’re not doing them. Because I’m not there. I’m here.”
    “Yes, but I don’t get it. What’s that got to do with you getting on with your own life?”
    “Maybe I just saw her point this time. I’m not going to change. I’m just stopping them from changing. When they probably need to. I think I just accepted the inevitable. Who I am. What I am. I’m fucked. That’s all.”
    “You’re not fucked.”
    “Oh no? Then what am I doing sitting here paying you seventy bucks an hour?”
    “You’re paying me so you don’t get fucked.”
    “By whom?”
    “By you. Joe Rule.”
    Marty shifted in his plush black leather chair, starting to get up, the signal that their hour was over. There was a clock on the wall directly over Rule’s head and he’d often tried to catch the man’s eyes going up there but he never had. He thought there was something sort of talented about that.
    “Hey, we finally got through one. A whole session. How about that.”
    The beeper went off in his jacket pocket.
    He flicked it off and laughed.
    “Almost.”
    Marty shrugged. “The only thing left to do is to hand me the check. We got through it.”
    Rule fished the check out of his wallet. “Here. Toward that place at the Vineyard.”
    “I already have a place at the Vineyard.”
    “You don’t just rent anymore?”
    “Not since last year.”
    “Hell. Some cop. I don’t know shit about you.”
    “You’re not supposed to.”
    “Mind if I use the phone?”
    “Do I ever?”
    Rule dialed in. He got Rita on the desk and then Covitski.
    “What’s up?”
    “Where are you?”
    “Never mind where I am. What’s up?”
    “Okay, fine. Be a pain in the ass. You’ve been leaning on a guy named Howard Gardner. Keeps fucking around on a restraining order. You and the ex have been in touch a few times, am I right?”
    “Right.”
    “Well, see, if I knew where you were, I might ask you to go on over there and have a little conversation with her. I mean, if you’re not out in Jersey or Connecticut or something. You know, if you’re close by. I don’t want this to be inconvenient for you, you know?”
    “Enough, Covitski. What’s the problem?”
    “Secretary over at the—what is it?—Inn at Green Gables, resort he owns, says he didn’t show up for work