She could have cancer, I thought, ironically. Hoho.

Again, I waited.

“You can’t tell anybody about this, right? I’ve never… admitted to anyone that I still support Rachel. I’m not sure people would understand.”

Understand? What, that you’re a saint? Why is that such a secret?

“I can’t divulge what you’ve told me, Bill. I won’t tell anyone that you support Rachel.”

“Good.”

“Do the kids know?”

He hesitated before he said, “No. They know I love their mother. That’s all they need to know.”

I considered the hesitation. What was that about? Why would he lie about that?

I couldn’t rationalize my follow-up question therapeutically. I knew I couldn’t, so I didn’t even try. But I asked it anyway. “How expensive is it? To support someone in Rachel’s circumstances? It must be a severe burden.”

He didn’t stumble over the question. “Of course it is. It helps a lot that she’s still on my health insurance. Frankly, that’s one reason why I would never-even if I felt differently-why I’d never go ahead with a divorce. If we were divorced, Rachel would have to rely on public health. That would be a… tragedy for her. The medicine alone… The occasional hospitalizations… The ER visits?”

Bill looked to me for an acknowledgment. I said, “I can only imagine.”

He sighed. “She has an apartment in Vegas, a small one, but it’s a nice place in a decent neighborhood. I pay… a caretaker… to look in on her, make sure she has food, has decent clothes, is clean, you know. And I provide what she needs for… the weddings. Dresses, gifts. She’s generous-you know that. I don’t want her to be living in filth or out on the street. I want my wife to be comfortable, and to be safe.”

I almost said, “A caretaker?” but I didn’t. I was wondering if Canada was Bill’s idea of a caretaker for his schizophrenic wife. Instead, I refocused on the budgetary arithmetic. I said, “It must add up.”

“It does,” he said. I thought he was going to say something else, but he stopped.

While I waited for him to resume, I revisited the math. Supporting Rachel the way that Bill described must be costing him two, three, maybe even four thousand dollars a month, depending on housing, medical, and pharmacy costs. I figured twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars a year. A lot of money.

If I added that amount to the amount that Reverend Howie told Raoul that Canada was paying him so that Rachel could attend weddings-I figured it was probably a similar amount, actually, another twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars a year-we were talking big money. Potentially very big money, since Canada was probably keeping an additional cut for his services. My gut instinct said that the total, fifty to a hundred thousand dollars annually, had to be more than someone in Bill Miller’s circumstances could afford.

Especially since we were talking after-tax dollars.

Bill tried to explain how he handled his generous allowance to his wife. “I make a good living. The company’s been good to me over the years. My career’s gone well. It would be better if I could make this living in Nevada, but I can’t. I consider myself fortunate. The kids and I cut some corners. We live simply. We manage. My car’s a lot older than yours.”

Bill had noticed my car? That gave me a little chill.

“Rachel’s not in treatment?” I asked.

“She’s not interested.”

“And you don’t use a home health care agency?”

“We’ve tried, but Rachel can be… difficult to deal with. Over the years, I’ve pieced something together, some… services that seem to work out. They meet her needs.” He smiled at me, just a little sheepish grin. “Is that it? Is that all that you needed to know?”

“No,” I said. “I have one more question. It’s similar to the first one I asked.”

“Shoot.”

“What is the nature of your relationship with the man who owns the house next door to yours?”

He nodded. “Doyle?”

I immediately knew that he’d been ready for that question; it was the one he’d been expecting from me all along. It wasn’t too surprising; Bill had twice spied me loitering on Doyle’s property. But I didn’t want to divulge the fact that I knew the name of the house’s owner, so I asked, “He owns the house to the north of yours?”

“Yeah, that’s Doyle. I barely know him.”

“Barely?”

“We were neighbors for… almost four years. But we weren’t close. He’s a loner, a single guy. He kept to himself. He’d be outside working; we’d say hi. That sort of thing. He invited me over once to look at his new waterfall, and his pond. Impressive. That’s probably the most time we ever spent together. He moved away before Thanksgiving, maybe even before Halloween. The house is vacant. But you know that.”

I noted the dig, but didn’t bite. “When’s the last time you spoke with him?”

“I’m having trouble understanding why that is any of your business.”

Although I knew that the reason Bill Miller was having trouble understanding why it was any of my business was because it wasn’t any of my business, I reiterated my dual-relationship concerns. Not too surprisingly, Bill seemed less satisfied by my explanation than he had been the first time.

He crossed his arms over his chest. His voice grew wary. “So you have some… professional relationship with Doyle? And if I’m his friend, you can’t have a professional relationship with me? That’s the deal?”

“I can’t divulge the nature of my current professional relationships. I’m sure you respect that. You asked me for my help with something. Before I’m able to agree to that request, it’s my responsibility to be certain that there aren’t any impediments.”

“Impediments?”

It was a stupid word, born of my anxiety over what I was doing, the tightrope I was trying to cross. But I was stuck with it. “Yes, impediments.”

Bill looked at me as though my subterfuge was as transparent as glass. He said, “Last fall sometime. He told me he was going to list the house. That was the last time I talked to Doyle.”

A pad of graph paper. A pencil with a fresh eraser. A whole lot of conjecture.

The meeting with Bill Miller was over and I was busy trying to compute how much it would take to raise two adolescent kids in an overpriced neighborhood in an overpriced town in an overpriced world. I had one small child in a similarly overpriced neighborhood in the same overpriced town, so I could fathom a guess as to what it was costing Bill Miller to support his family in Boulder. Mortgage, property taxes, food, health insurance, car payments, some amount of recreation, teenage whims… hell, I hadn’t even considered any additional funds that Bill might try to set aside to fund his eventual retirement.

To the sum at the bottom of my sheet of graph paper, I added the approximate costs I’d already computed that it would take to maintain a schizophrenic wife in a gambling and resort town in another state, and somehow simultaneously support her extravagant serial wedding habit.

Total all those amounts, do some rough reverse income-tax calculations, and I would have a guess, admittedly shoddy, as to exactly how many pretax dollars Bill Miller would have to earn to possibly meet all his financial commitments. My conclusion? I was guessing that Bill Miller would need to earn three hundred thousand dollars a year, minimum.

One of the things therapists do every day is listen to people talk about personal things, things like their money. Over the years, hearing various patients discuss their salary ranges for this job and that job, I’d developed a pretty good sense of what kind of living people made doing what kind of work in Boulder County.

There was no way Bill Miller made three hundred grand a year as a district manager of a chain of retail drugstores. What did I think Bill Miller was paid? Low end? Eighty to a hundred thousand dollars. High end? One fifty. One eighty, tops.