Sanford Crow

CHAPTER 26

The fat woman, Patty, dabbed the corner of her eye with the corner of the tissue. Her sob story was always the same: her kids, her husband, her job, her life, never-ending and never shifting course. She wasn't fulfilled, so she filled up on junk food.

Diane looked at her and couldn't help but be disgusted. She wrinkled her nose at the rolls of blubber overlapping each other, but otherwise, her face was a mask of sympathy.

"It's hard," Patty said, "being this big, it's hard to do anything. I treat the people around me—the people I love—like shit. I know I do, but I can't seem to help it. It's like I blame them for the way I look."

Diane nodded. She had to admit, the fat bitch did have a clear lens into her self, and it made her job that much easier. But my God, is she disgusting.

"Can you tell me what your parents were like, Patty?" Diane asked, wishing she didn't, but it was a good way to let the hour waste away.

"They were big... like me. Both are dead now."

Probably from heart failure.

"Heart complications," Patty said. "They would feed me whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, I guess the way I do with my children. They're big too... like me. Guess it's kind of like a vicious cycle, huh?"

"Kind of," Diane said, and coaxed her into delving deeper.

"It was all the time when I was younger. I'd get a bad grade, 'here's some cake.' I'd get a good grade, 'here's some ice cream.' There was this one time at school when the kids started chanting 'Fatty Patty' in the cafeteria because I walked in with a tray overflowing with food and I..."

Diane's mind floated away. She wondered where Sanford was, the one patient she actually deemed interesting. Knowing he went back home, she was surprised he hadn't called, and let her in on the details. Damn, she wanted those details. More than anything, she just wanted to know how it all would unfold.

Instead, there she was, with Fatty Patty. She was patient number two in a day of six, regurgitating one self-indulgent story after the next, with complaints and nagging and no real conviction to change themselves. They just wanted someone to unload their shit on.

And why not me?

But there it was too, the irony of complaining to herself with no real conviction of changing anything. A smile swept over her face amid a depressing anecdote of how cruel children could be. Patty stopped when she noticed.

"I'm sorry, is that funny?" she asked.

"What?" Diane said, confused. "No, of course not. Continue, please."

"Well, the other boy had my mashed potatoes and was flinging it from the plastic spoon, kind of like a catapult, into my face. A couple of the girls and two other boys were holding me still, laughing, betting with each other if I'd open my mouth and try to catch it..."

Diane drifted again. I wonder what the weather in Maine's like right now. Cold, I'd imagine... colder than here. Earlier, she was at the gun range, taking aim at past aggressions. The temperature was in the high twenties and Diane chose to keep her shooting gloves in the car. She wanted to feel the steel, cold against her skin. She wanted to imagine the worst-case scenario, being stranded in the wilderness, freezing, a bear with her scent in his nostrils. Would she be able to pull the trigger in time? To hit him where it counts? Or would she freeze when it really mattered?

Jake had been behind her, whispering the correct procedures.

"You sound like a broken record."

"It's better to be repetitive than dead."

She saw the bear, she saw the fraternity boy, smelled him, and she saw her father and thought about how he left. She saw her patients, all of them, including Fatty Patty. And she emptied the clip, each bullet, striking home.

Even now, sitting in her leather armchair, her trigger finger itched and curled into a loop. She imagined Sanford on the couch, in that state of his, hypnotized, yet out of her control. Her power, slipping; it was confusing. She had never seen anything like it before. If she hypnotized Fatty Patty, she could probably make her eat herself. The thought of that made her want to burst out laughing.

She looked over at her desk and noticed she'd left Sanford's file out. In the past week, it had been steadily growing thick. She had taken it upon herself to go into his past, finding newspaper articles about a serial killer in Maine, who'd murdered his wife and left behind two boys.

"He was such a nice man," one neighbor said. "He seemed normal to me," the man across the street had said. "He even let me borrow his lawnmower every weekend." He was probably thrilled to have his name in the paper. Just once she'd like to read about when the neighbors had always known. How that man would give them the creeps, and they'd draw their shades every time he was outside. But that was never the case, was it? Especially with Jonathan Crow, who'd dedicated his life to blending in.

It's kind of admirable.

She wanted nothing more than to go down the street to the library and scroll through the past. She looked at the clock... ten more minutes until Fatty Patty was out. Ten minutes too long; an eternity in her mind. Plus, she had four more patients coming in, and the thought of that was pushing her to the brink of exhaustion.

"You know what the worst part was? When they were done, and I was left with a face full of dripping potatoes? I played into it and fed myself the food that was plastered on my face," Patty said, fully crying. The dainty tear wipes were no more.

Diane became more disgusted than ever.

"I'm sorry Patty, we're gonna have to cut this short."

"What? Why?" Patty panicked.

"There's an important phone call I'm expecting, and I have to turn the ringer back on to get it, which I turned off to not be rude to you. I'm sorry."

"Oh, okay. Well thank you, Dr. Wesley, this has been real helpful. Same time next week?" Patty asked.

"Same time next week," Diane repeated.

Watching Patty rock her body so she could stand was like watching a zoo animal. On the third body rock, she propelled herself to her feet, waddling like a penguin towards the door. When the door shut behind her, Diane sighed.

She didn't enjoy being mean. Do I? But she felt it best not to answer her own question. I didn't lie anyway, she told herself. Sanford was expected to call; it was only a matter of time. For now, she had an extra ten minutes to think, and she'd use every second of it to make sure she had the right thing to say when he did.