Chapter 2
"Meet Dr. Richard Dickinson"
Richard Dickinson sat at his desk deep in concentration. He was twiddling a pencil back and forth between his left hand and right fist as he sat staring down at the scrawl on the pages of a large spiral notebook.
The spasms in his disabled hand had gone now, thanks to his little white pills, and his right hand felt just as normal as his left one. It just didn't quite look the same, and sometimes the skeletal fingers ached with tightness at night. The injury nagged him most of the time, mainly because he was so damned "right-handed", and had never been able (or even willing) to try to train his left hand to take up the slack. This resulted in hand spasms, but they were usually controllable.
In social situations he kept his hand in the appropriate trouser pocket, and usually made it a point to never try to shake hands with anybody. The Japanese habit of bowing from the waist, he'd found, took people's focus away from the hand-shaking thing. It confused them enough that they would usually wonder about his national background, rather than search for a reason why he kept his right hand hidden from sight.
Confusion was better than collusion, right?
When he was seven years old, Dick had fallen off his Flexible Flyer, and his wrist was promptly run over by the kid on the sled right behind him. Broken bones and severed tendons resulted, and an ambulance tied up in traffic at the scene of another accident delayed his trip to the hospital. He was left with all four fingers of his right hand atrophied tightly against his palm. A deep surgical scar near his elbow was the result of an attempt to use transplanted fibrous tissue to restore movement to his fingers. The surgery failed.
Luckily, or so they assured his parents at the time, he had full use of his right thumb. He could still hold a pencil or a pen by shoving one or the other between two of the useless fingers and grasping it with the thumb. He could still turn the pages of a book and use eating utensils, and ultimately scratch an itch if the urge presented itself. Being a seven-year-old kid, Dick quickly adapted to his abrupt change in physical abilities, and learned to live with it in a far more successful manner than his parents ever did.
The main drawback was the fact that the claw-like configuration tended to attract lint!
Now, as an adult, he had long grown sick and tired of explaining the disability to every curious stranger, and so adopted strange habits in order to not have to do so. Some of them were ingenious. He was an expert, for instance, at giving the "thumbs up" sign. His friends simply rolled their eyes and ignored him.
Dick laid the pencil down on the page of the notebook and rose to his feet to pour himself a cup of coffee from the urn behind his desk. He was a meticulous man, small of stature but large of mind. He had a thin face with a narrow nose, slightly humped in the middle; thin lips, black hair and blue eyes. If he'd been a handsome man it might have been a lethal combination, but even those who loved him most had never thought of him as handsome. His dark-rimmed glasses dominated his face, making him appear slightly owlish. That was not a bad thing though, for the combination, when viewed objectively, gave him a look of wisdom, which he had used for years to give his clients and patients a confidence in him far beyond what he felt he deserved. But he figured it didn't hurt to advertise a little, right?
Dick was Jewish, and he kept a decorative Menorah on the ledge directly above the coffee urn. A Star of David was set into the middle of the large ruby ring he wore on his left ring finger in lieu of a wedding band. The ring had been a gift from his life's partner, Ardais Verengi-Degas on their twelfth anniversary. Neither man had ever been less than up-front about their orientation, and though both were psychologists, neither man had ever lost a client due to prejudice against the person they chose to love.
Dick sat down at his desk again with the steaming cup. He drank it black, but he wasn't sure how Jimmy Wilson drank his. It had been a long time since their all-night sessions at college, and he just didn't remember. Besides, Jimmy could help himself.
Oatmeal and raisin cookies were on the sideboard.
Dick studied the chicken scratch in his notebook. There were a few questions he'd have to ask when Jim arrived. Mainly … what made him travel all the way to Pennsylvania for a consultation? Was his patient a notorious inmate of some kind? He wondered.
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