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    Julie barely looked up when I came in. “What have you got there?”
    “Four bottles of water and the clothes Mr. Monk was wearing today.”
    “Why do you have his clothes?”
    “He wanted me to burn them but he doesn’t have an incinerator.”
    “Neither do we,” she said. It came out sounding more like a warning than a statement of fact.
    “No, but we can build a bonfire in the backyard or burn them in our fireplace.”
    “You aren’t going to, are you?”
    “Why not?” I said, just to needle her.
    “Because it’s crazy and someone might see you,” she said. “I have to live in this neighborhood.”
    “Of course I’m not going to burn his clothes.” I dropped the bag near the front door and took out the bottles of water, lugging them over to the couch. “What made you think that I would?”
    “Because you do a lot of crazy things for him and it’s embarrassing.”
    “For me, maybe, but not for you.”
    I put the bottles on the coffee table, sat down next to her, and opened up the Hawaiian Springs water for myself.
    “What about the first-aid kit he gave me that I had to take to school every day?” she asked. “Or the lunches with everything cut into squares?”
    I took a big sip of the water. I couldn’t taste Hawaii in it, or any pollutants or bird gas, but the water did feel crisper and lighter on my tongue than what came out of my kitchen sink.
    “It’s not unusual for sandwiches to be square,” I said.
    “It is for cookies and potato chips,” she said. “People thought I was the nut who sat with a pair of scissors cutting my potato chips into squares.”
    “The fact that Mr. Monk took so much time and effort on your behalf shows how much he cares for you.”
    “That’s not what it shows,” she said. “So what are you going to do with his clothes?”
    “I’ll drop them off at Goodwill on my way to work in the morning.”
    “I need you to take my bike in to be repaired, too. Something is wrong with the gears.”
    We were having a conversation but she hadn’t looked up at me and was texting the entire time. I didn’t know how she could have two conversations at once, even if one was verbal and the other one was not.
    “Why don’t you take it to the bike shop yourself?”
    “Because it’s, like, miles away.”
    “You’re on summer vacation,” I said. “What else do you have to do?”
    “Why should I walk it all the way there when it’s much quicker and easier for you to just drop it off?”
    “Because I am not your slave. What if I get a stain on my pants? I’ll have to come back home and change my clothes or Mr. Monk will insist on setting fire to them when he sees me.”
    “You wouldn’t have to run errands for me if I had a car,” Julie said.
    Our arguments often came back to her constant nagging for a car. She hated being seen in mine, a Buick sedan, and felt that being “dropped off by her mother” everywhere was humiliating.
    “So buy one,” I said.
    “I don’t have the money.”
    “Get a job,” I said.
    That got her attention. She looked at me as if I’d just told her to run naked down the street singing show tunes.
    “It’s summer,” she said. “I’ve just come off of a long, hard year of school. I need to recharge. Like bears need hibernation in the winter.”
    “So where do you think this car is going to come from?”
    “You could buy me one.”
    “With what?”
    “Don’t you have some money set aside?”
    “We can’t afford an aside.”
    “What about for emergencies?”
    “We can’t afford emergencies, either.”
    Julie sighed with the full weight of her teenage angst and frustration. It was quite a sigh, truly Monkian in its exaggerated theatricality. I was tempted to applaud.
    “You could ask for a raise,” she said.
    I laughed. “From Adrian Monk?”
    “Why not?”
    “You have met the man, haven’t you? He’s not just a tightwad—his wallet is hermetically sealed. And I mean that literally.”
    “You could ask