Mr. Monk Helps Himself Read Online Free PDF Page A

also explain him smelling of her perfume. You don’t always get that from a fight.”
    “No, you don’t,” I agreed.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Mr. Monk Goes Unanswered
    I guess it didn’t really hit me emotionally until the drive back.
    We were barely onto the I-280, heading north when Monk brought up the obvious—insensitive but obvious. “Okay, maybe I didn’t cause her suicide,” he admitted. “It was her husband’s affair. Ms. Cult Leader found out and couldn’t handle it.”
    “That’s not true,” I protested. “Miranda helped hundreds of women deal with this exact situation. You didn’t know her. You can’t judge.”
    “It’s not a judgment.” He was tightly gripping his seat belt the way he always did when I drove. “In seventy-nine percent of suicides in which one or both partners are having an affair, the affair is the primary cause of the suicide. It’s a well-known statistic.”
    “Well-known? I’ve never heard of it.”
    “That’s because you don’t read the annual report from the World Health Organization. It’s in a footnote on page three forty-four.”
    “Statistics,” I snorted, and kept my eyes locked on the road. “Did you know that sixty-two point seven percent of all statistics are made up?”
    “No. You’re making that up.”
    “Exactly.”
    He winced. “I get it. Humor. Well, that doesn’t change the facts. Your beloved cult leader—”
    “Stop calling her that,” I shouted into the windshield. “She has a name. It’s Miranda and she was a wonderful human being. She was more giving and caring than you’ll ever be. So don’t pretend you know her, because you don’t. You don’t have a clue. Not a clue.”
    Looking back on those words, I can see how harsh they sound. But at the moment, they expressed exactly how I felt and I wasn’t about to take them back.
    For once, in a personal interaction, Monk said the right thing. Nothing. No protest, no statistic, no counterargument. It was probably the only way of stopping my rant, and somewhere inside, he knew it.
    We sat for several minutes, until the merge onto 101 North. Then, calmer and sick of the silence, I punched the button on the radio. But instead of the comfort of the classic oldies on 89.3, I heard, “The drive for happiness is a modern phenomenon.” It was her voice, soothing and self-assured. “No one asked the cave man if he was happy. Throughout most of history, it was only important that someone’s God was made happy or the local lord or king. The life of man, according to an English philosopher, was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ But we live in different times—wonderful times—with an almost limitless possibility for creating our own joy.”
    I had forgotten that I’d been listening to the CD on the drive down. I switched it off and the car fell once more into silence. Not quite silence. I found myself sobbing the rest of the way.
    I dropped Monk off at his apartment on Pine Street, still crying (me, not him), then steered my middle-aged Subaru down Divisadero to a treelined street and my protective cocoon of a Victorian row house.
    There was already a car in my driveway and I was so glad to see it. I parked on the street. By the time I made it to the front door, it was open. Ellen Morse appeared in the doorway, wearing my favorite white apron, her eyes wet with tears, holding open her arms. I fell right into them.
    “I knew you taped a key under your mailbox,” she said, shutting the door behind us. “I hope you don’t mind. But I thought you shouldn’t be alone.” A familiar savory smell wafted in from the kitchen. “Meat loaf,” she explained. “And mac and cheese. Comfort food was invented for moments like this.”
    This was so Ellen. She wasn’t just being empathetic. Anyone can do that, except Monk. But to take it upon yourself to do something big, like buy groceries and break into my house and cook dinner. She even figured out where I kept the garlic press and how to