Free Dry Ice by Stephen White Page B

it's a Coach."
        My nine-thirty was one of those patients who had secrets. Hers had a few parts. She was the wife of a cross-dressing man—that was one secret—who owned a wildly successful student bar in town. Together they had two children. The second child, a seven-year-old boy, wasn't her husband's biological son. Her husband didn't know that.
        That was the second secret.
        Small-town secrets. Let them loose and all the usual consequences were possible: shame, guilt, loss of control, recrimination.
        More germane to the discovery in the yard, however, was the fact that my patient was a fashion maven who could reliably recognize a handbag's pedigree from twenty paces. I didn't doubt her assessment of its heritage. After she pointed it out— and after I accepted that it had more of her attention than I did—I excused myself, stepped outside, retrieved the purse, returned to my office, and set it on my desk.
        "Aren't you curious?" she asked. "Don't you want to know whose it is?"
        "That can wait. This is your time," I said. It was a therapeutic thing to say. This patient's favorite form of resistance was diversion. Since she knew most of the town's movers and shakers, she always had some compelling gossip to use as bait with me. It was my job not to be seduced by the tangents. The purse was definitely tangent bait.
        "It's last season's, or the one before that," she said, casting her fly into the stream one more time. She'd been unable to resist adding a final editorial assessment to sweeten the lure. I could tell she was hoping to feel a tug on the line. I noted that despite some effort to keep the dismissiveness from her voice she had ultimately failed. I gave her points for trying and allowed myself a moment's conceit that her restraint was an indication of some nascent therapeutic progress. She'd been working on her critical tendencies.
        "No one is wearing that shade of green anymore," she added, under her breath.
        I mentally removed the gold star from her chart. One of my patient's other issues was the way she used condescension and sarcasm as relationship foils.
        I didn't respond to the "shade of green" comment. She and I had many more important things to discuss, although I didn't have much confidence that we would get around to them anytime soon. Instead we would spend the next forty minutes swatting at the impediments that she erected in the path of anything that resembled change.

    After my client left my office at the end of the session—her mental health in no better repair than it had been when she arrived— I took a closer look at the purse. The bag was fashionable, but worn; its owner was not a woman who changed purses regularly or treated her handbags gently. And yes, a postage-stamp-size leather tag hanging from a brass chain on the strap identified it as a Coach. I didn't see any indication that the bag had spent much time out in the elements. I guessed that it had been tossed or dropped on the lawn sometime the night before.
        Inside the zippered top was a wallet that was much older than the purse, a cheap spiral notebook with most of its pages ripped out, an opened package of tissues, an almost-full tin of cinnamon Altoids, a spare battery for some electronic device, the non-business end of a USB thumb drive, some Apple earbuds, two well-chewed pencils, a deck of playing cards wrapped in a rubber band, a tennis ball, and a few golden foil wrappers that had been spun and pressed into tiny round balls. I guessed the foils were from candies. In an inside pocket of the purse, also zippered, was a cheap pen and a prescription bottle with about a dozen remaining caplets of Valtrex.
        I made two safe assumptions: The purse was owned by a woman, and she suffered from genital herpes.
        The condition of the tennis ball—the ball was hairless and covered in what appeared to be dried slime—suggested to me that the