The Ditto Effect
by Matson Sewell
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
The crowd shuffled through the hallway with surrounding conversations covering Harvey’s speechless delight. The dining hall, a friendlier setting with low-beamed ceilings and a warm din, had been arranged in tables for eight.
The group filtered through the room, settling one or two at a time at each table. He and Tiffany joined an old fellow with a startling white handlebar moustache. He introduced himself as Delbert Finch but preferred to be called Bert, pointing to his nametag.
“Show me somebody’s medication history” — Bert dropped his voice confidentially — “and I’ll tell you the story of a person’s life. Fifty years of experience as a pharmacist in Modesto, and I have plenty of stories to tell.”
Anna joined the table along with several other women. Harvey was introduced again as “Ditto Winchester,” and several exclaimed over the benefits of such a name for a writer. Tiffany mentioned how well the name suited him. So it was too late to change the nametag. What was the harm with letting people call him Ditto during the conference?
Maybe it was the new name, or the glass of wine that went to his head but, during the first dinner, Harvey’s tongue-tied awkwardness evolved into quiet confidence. He contributed only the briefest comments to the conversation, but his face felt alive and new. The others, he noticed, seemed to glance mainly at him when they spoke.
Tiffany explained she was recently divorced and an empty-nester with too much time on her hands. Her hometown paper had agreed to let her write a weekly column on domestic humor.
Harvey grinned as he lifted his glass of wine in a toast. “Is that domestic as opposed to imported?”
“No,” Tiffany leaned against his shoulder, “domestic as opposed to wild.”
These folks were different from the people he usually spent time with. They were sharp thinkers, and he felt sharper around them. A little buzz had started in his belly. He liked the feeling, although it made him kind of nervous.
* * *
The buzz in his belly wouldn’t let him get to sleep until three in the morning. He woke up at his usual time: six o’clock, alert and eager to see what the day would bring. Suddenly, curiously, he was afraid to step out of his room. He decided to identify the feeling as excitement rather than fear, much as he did in his first year as a cop entering each work shift. He grabbed the tooled leather notebook Helen had given him their last Christmas together.
That first full day, Harvey wrote in his notebook whenever a surprising idea or memory surfaced. By bedtime, five pages were filled with disjointed fragments and tangents colliding across the pages, with arrows connecting thoughts. This wouldn’t make any sense once he returned home. Or might he be seeing the first hints of a story?
He couldn’t sleep again the second night. Rather than rolling around in a tangle of sheets, he sat with his notebook by the open window, breathing the crisp forest air. He wrote pages and pages about Helen, the last days when she was wasted down to bones, when he had to help her to the toilet. His wife, who never fully undressed in front of him with the lights on, lost her privacy toward the end. Harvey never forgot how, in the years and years they were married, she let her warm passion unfold over him like a cashmere blanket. In the dark.
He wrote about Sissy and the decent man she married and then tossed aside because she “outgrew the marriage.” He wrote about her seven-year old son, conceived for perfect astrological and numerological compatibility but who, as a normally oppositional toddler, she turned over to her ex-husband, claiming a boy needed his father. She was good at every job, although, after a short while, each job was no longer good for her.
He wrote about a little girl of six with darting eyes, too quick with sizing up situations and reading cues. What had he and Helen done to encourage such cunning? Helen told him about a birthday party where the birthday boy’s mother teasingly said to Sissy, “I bet you don’t want any cake.”
Sissy’s face, suddenly stricken, rearranged itself into nonchalance. “No, thank you. I don’t want any.”
Helen leaned down to reassure her. “It’s okay, sweetheart. She’s only kidding about—”
“No,” the girl snapped, “I don’t want any.” Sissy skipped across the room to play with her friend’s newly unwrapped presents while the other children enjoyed cake and ice cream.
Harvey wondered if he and Helen should have done more all those years ago, to help Sissy learn to deal with the pain of loss or the fear of it. He and Helen often stood together, bewildered, as they watched their daughter every day become even more herself and less like them. She had her vegetable-juice fasts and other routines that carved her face into angles and left her, in his opinion, too lean, no longer looking like either parent. Even their genetic influence on her was no longer visible.
* * *
By the third day of too little sleep, the faces in the dining room began to shimmy slightly over morning coffee. The physical world now hummed with a distinct vibration, and Harvey couldn’t tell if this was more real or less real than his regular life.
The vibration intensified and pulsed in his shirt pocket. It was a text from his regular life, from Sissy, with Josh’s second-grade photo. Josh, with his heartbreakingly goofy smile and his sturdy blond cowlick that no amount of water or hair gunk could tame, gazed back at his grandpop.
Harvey enjoyed the conference speakers, the retired cop less than the others. The cop’s arrogant anecdotes were punctuated by microphone pops and squeals, sending the conference staff hustling in crouches to adjust the volume and then replace the mike. The possibility of writing his own cop story winked at him, although the most important story might be too hard to tell. He’d add it to the notebook.
The scrappy emergency nurse, in her hot-pink scrubs and holding the replacement mike near her mouth, strode the full length of the stage like a rock star. She had great stories about important things: life and death, mistakes with big consequences, the triumph of humor in the face of disaster.
The pinstripe-suited trial lawyer described how he was inspired by events from life but, when he wrote fiction, changed important details in order to gain better perspective. Harvey took reams of notes on every speaker without knowing why or how he’d use them.
On the third day, after the last speaker, he trudged to the car hauling his beaten-up duffel bag on its end-wheels, his mood sagging. No last songfest around the campfire as they’d done at Mohawk camp when he was a kid. Would the brief exchanges of phone numbers with five or six people breathe new life into his old routine at home?
* * *
Anna called from the Sacramento airport two weeks after the conference. She had a long layover on her way to visit a sister in Salt Lake City and would Ditto like to come out to the airport for a drink?
“What does she want with you?” his daughter had to know while she moved more boxes packed with Helen’s clothing to the front hall. Harvey had finally agreed to clear out Helen’s things, especially clothing others could use. Sissy had wasted no time driving the seven hours from Los Angeles before he changed his mind again.
“You wanted me to start socializing, Sissy.”
“Cecilia, Dad.”
“Ditto, Daughter.”
She laughed, more full-throated and heartier than he remembered her laughing since she was a baby, when he blew raspberries against her precious, chubby belly.
Harvey never intended to tell her about the name, but she found out when she brought in his mail after pulling her zippy, red electric car to a silent stop in his driveway. The mail included a scented mauve envelope addressed to Ditto Winchester. He had to confess to the name and the blossoming correspondence with his friends from the conference.
“When are you going to let me read some of your writing?” his daughter asked.
“Soon. I’m starting a serious first draft.”
“I’ll let you get to work.” She leaned forward to kiss him on the top of his head, her hair grazing his face, hair the same color as Helen’s, a smoky blonde other women had to buy in a bottle. Her hand rested on his, next to his keyboard, warmly and for just a moment, before she returned to the master bedroom to pack up Helen’s sweaters and handbags.
* * *
Harvey drilled down on every note from the conference and the first scribbled rough draft he’d been working on. It was a story about two cops: an impulsive rookie who thinks he knows it all and an old-timer who hesitates to consider the options and consequences. They have nothing in common but are assigned to the same patrol car. In the crisis scene, the cops respond to a domestic dispute that turns ugly.
However, the story’s ending was elusive. One choice honored the fact of his partner’s near-fatal shooting, the young cop blaming himself for impulsive action and not his partner for hesitation and inaction. But that version let the writer off too easy. On the other hand, ending both cops’ careers might be too hard to tackle.
Something nudged him to reach for an essential and untidy resolution, where the cops’ faces reflect an unspoken change lit by the strobing blues and reds of first responders.
This wasn’t the first time Harvey had struggled with words. As a rookie, in the time it took him to learn to type up reports with ten fingers instead of two, he had discovered the difference between evidence and reality. It often bothered him, reporting facts that didn’t feel like the truth. And now, words were all he had to work with. Again.
With his eyes on a certain flickering and impossible destination, Harvey centered the cursor and typed:
Patrol Partners
by Ditto Winchester
Copyright © 2026 by Matson Sewell
