Pages 960–964

Gately's bed · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

Pat Montesian's office at Ennet House, sometime during Gately's hospital stay — he says he's been "up at Saint Elizabeth's off and on for three days." Two people only: Pat, third-person close, professionally cool steel; and a rumpled visitor in a slept-in Cardin coat, rotating a Stetson in his lap, an Assistant District Attorney who insists he isn't here professionally. The comedy of his diction — prosecutor's pomposity grafted onto fresh recovery jargon, "It's so damnably ironic" — is played absolutely straight, and the scene expects you to hear both registers at once.

Terms, in order of appearance

Choices (p. 960) — endnote 383: a treatment facility, Winter Park, Florida; where he "went through" last winter.
Phob-Comp-Anon (p. 960) — 12-Step splinter group for the families and codependents of phobics and compulsives.
enmeshment (p. 961) — recovery-speak: losing your own boundaries inside another person's condition.
working Nine (p. 961) — AA's Ninth Step: direct amends to the people you've harmed, wherever possible.
detach with love (p. 961) — the family-group slogan: stop managing the other person's condition without abandoning the person.
two-step out (p. 962) — dance neatly out of; his phrase for escaping prosecution, not a 12-Step term.
NoCoat LinguaScraper (p. 964) — the tongue-scraper brand from the pp. 144–51 ad catastrophe; Tooty uses hers till it bleeds.

After you read: three things

1. You've met this man — from the other side of his window. He never gives his name, but the wife tormented about dental hygiene, the North Shore grudge, the years of biding: this is the A.D.A. from Gately's burglary story on pp. 55–60, the one whose revenge has been the engine of Gately's legal dread ever since. Here he says it himself: "The kid's picture's been up on my Priority-board... I've been biding my time, waiting to get him" (p. 962).

2. The plot quietly resolves, and only you and Pat hear it. He has already tossed the file on the "Canadian assault" — the shootout night of pp. 601–19 — so Gately is "going to two-step out of" prosecution entirely (p. 962). But he can't say so publicly, Pat is sworn to silence, and Gately can be left to "simmer on" not knowing (p. 963). You now hold a fact the book's central patient doesn't.

3. Watch where the sincerity actually lands. The previous scene was a refused apology from the other end of Boston's class scale; this one can't even get into the room — hours outside the door with the Serenity Prayer, and "that son of a bitch is evil" arrives inside the very sentence about extending his hand (p. 964). What speaks to Pat's heart isn't the speech: it's his mismatched socks. Exit line: "Haven't yet been willing. Yet. I wish to emphasize yet."

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.