Joanna shook her head. “I don’t think so, sweetie. Look at the time. If I take you by the clinic and then to school, we’ll both end up being late. If you want to, though, you can ride with me as far as the bus stop.”
Joanna thought her reply was perfectly reasonable. Jenny’s response was not. “I hate school!” she lashed out with an unexpected vehemence that took Joanna by surprise. “And I hate meetings, too! You always have to go to meetings. You’re always in a hurry!”
With that, Jenny turned and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Joanna hurried after her. “Jenny… “
“I don’t want to ride with you!” Jenny yelled angrily from the laundry-room door. “I’ll ride my bike to the bus stop, and I don’t care if you take Tigger to the vet or not. Just leave him here if you want to. That way you won’t be late.”
Stunned by her daughter’s angry outburst, Joanna started with a conciliatory “Jenny,” but by then the child was beyond hearing. She had slammed the outside door as well, rattling the window, and was already halfway across the yard on her way to the old farm equipment shed that served as a garage.
Fighting back tears herself, Joanna followed Jenny as far as the door, but she didn’t open it. Through the windowpane she watched her daughter push her bike out of the garage, mount it at a run, and then go charging up the road, disappearing finally as the road meandered off through a forest of bleak, winter-weary mesquite. Watching the speeding hike, it seemed to Joanna as though all of Jenny’s pent-up anger and grief were localized in those stiffly set shoulders and in the furiously pumping little legs.
No doubt, Jennifer Ann Brady had every right to be angry. Her father was dead. Andrew Roy Brady had fallen victim to a drug lord’s hit man some four months earlier. For a nine-year-old, this was a heavy burden to bear. In the past few months, Joanna had done some serious reading on the subject of children and the grief process. The experts had all warned that children often coped with their pain by doing a certain amount of “acting out.” The problem was that Joanna felt as though she was always the target of that acting out. She had searched the reading material for possible suggestions in dealing with her troubled daughter. The difficulty lay in the fact that helpful suggestions from experts seldom took into consideration the fact that the parents were grieving too. Had Joanna been at the top of her own form, Jenny’s periodic outbursts might not have been that bad. As things stood, Joanna’s own grieving process was far from over.
“Damn you anyway, Andy,” Joanna mumbled as she hurried back to the bedroom to stuff her feet into a pair of shoes that had somehow migrated under the bed. “Why did you have to go and die and leave me holding the bag?”
Joanna was glad there was no one to hear when she talked aloud to Andy that way. He had been a Cochise County deputy and a candidate for sheriff at the time of his death back in September. After his death, Joanna had been persuaded to run for the office of sheriff in his stead. The campaign and the election had happened while she was still in such a fog of grief that Joanna barely renumbered them. Now, though, as she tried to cope with both the complexities of her new job and the difficulties of being a newly single parent, were times when she found herself taking Andy to task for leaving her to manage alone in the face of such daunting responsibilities.
Outside, the late-January chill of Arizona ’s high desert country had put a thin layer of frost over the Blazer’s wind-shield. It scraped off easily enough with one or two swipes of the wipers. A steady wind was blowing up out of the Gulf of Mexico, with the wind-chill factor making it seem far colder than the forty-five degrees the thermometer indicated. The sky up over the Mule Mountains behind High Lonesome Ranch was a deep, cloudless blue.
As the Blazer started down the rutted dirt road, Sadie was coming back from accompanying Jenny on the ride down to the end of the road, where a school bus would pick her up sometime within the next ten minutes. Without the challenge of a race with Tigger, Sadie made only a halfhearted attempt to follow the Blazer, giving up the chase long before Joanna reached High Lonesome Road. Usually Joanna would stop half a mile down the road and order the dogs back into the yard, but for Sadie, alone that morning, all joy seemed to have gone out of the game.
Even the dogs are having a bad day, Joanna thought with a grim smile.
At the intersection where High Lonesome Ranch’s mile-long private road met up with the county-maintained High Lonesome Road, Joanna spotted Jenny. She had chained her bike to one of the uprights on the cattle guard and was standing, with her arms crossed tightly across her chest, facing into the blowing wind.
She looked so small, lost, and lonely standing there all by herself that Joanna’s arms ached with the need to comfort her, Io heal the hurt somehow. Tigger seemed to have the same inclination. As they drove up to where Jenny stood, the dog sat up in the backseat and whined forlornly.
Joanna pulled over next to the child and rolled down the window. Jenny stared down at her feet and began kicking rocks.
“Don’t forget, you’re supposed to go to Grandma Brady’s after Brownies this afternoon,” Joanna said. “I’ll pick you up from there as soon as I get off work.”
“Okay,” Jenny acknowledged without looking up. “Aren’t you going to come kiss me good-bye?” Joanna asked.
Jenny shook her head and continued to kick pebbles.
“I’m sorry we had a disagreement,” Joanna ventured, hoping an apology would put things right for both of them. Jenny relented, but only a little.
“It’s okay,” she mumbled. “You’d better go. You’ll be late.”
“I love you,” Joanna said.
But Jenny wasn’t ready to unbend enough to respond in kind. “Here comes the bus,” she said. “I’d better go, too. Take good care of Tigger.” With that she was gone, turning from her mother with her frizzy disaster of a permanent standing almost straight up in the stiff breeze.
“Have a nice day,” Joanna murmured behind her out the open window of the truck. It seemed to her that the rocks and windblown ocotillo paid more attention to her words than Jenny did. Joanna waited long enough to see Jenny safely on the school bus before she drove off.
As Joanna put the Blazer back in gear and started down the road in a moving cloud of red dust kicked up by the big yellow school bus, she had a prickly sense of déjà vu, although it wasn’t exactly the same. Joanna had been a year older than Jenny when her own father died-fifteen to Jenny’s nine, but the situation had been eerily similar. It had been a chill winter evening and she had been walking home from the ballpark along Arizona Street in a driving rainstorm. Her mother, Eleanor, had come looking for her. Eleanor had driven along beside Joanna, pleading with her to get in the car.
For the first time, Joanna remembered that Eleanor had been crying as she begged her daughter to please just get in the car.
Fourteen years later, Joanna had no idea what the exact origins of the quarrel had been that night or what had driven Joanna out into the awful weather. She was sure, though, that it had happened within a few months of Big Hank Lathrop’s death. Now she found herself wondering if she and her mother hadn’t been locked in the same kind of battle she and Jenny were dealing with now. Maybe part of the wedge between Eleanor and Joanna, the thing that had kept them at loggerheads for years, was the sudden violent death of a husband and father. D.H. Lathrop and Andy Brady had both been wiped out of existence without a moment’s warning, leaving behind an awful void, to be filled by years of shed tears and hurt feelings.
For the first time in all those years, Joanna Brady felt a twinge of guilt as she wondered if it was possible that she had been as hard on Eleanor as Jenny was being on her.