Joanna was almost thirty years old now. Big Hank Lathrop had been dead for fifteen years, but as Joanna held the photo in her hand she missed her father more than she could have thought possible. She missed him almost as much as she missed her deputy sheriff husband, Andy, who had died a victim of the country’s continuing war on drugs only two months earlier.
It took real effort for her to speak around the word-trapping lump that mysteriously filled throat. “I always liked that one, too,” she managed.
Joanna usually thought of Jenny as resembling Andy far more than she did her mother’s side of the family, but studying the photo closely, she could see that Jenny and the little girl in the twenty-two-year-old picture might have been sisters.
“How come none of these are in color?” Jenny asked. “They look funny. Like pictures in a museum.”
“Because Grandpa Lathrop developed them himself,” Joanna answered. “In that room below the stairs in Grandma Lathrop’s basement. That was his darkroom. He always said he liked working in black and white better than he did in color.”
Carefully, Joanna began gathering the scattered photos, returning them to the familiar shoe box that had been their storage place for as many years she could remember. “Come on now,” she urged. “It’s time to go to bed in your own room.”
Jenny pouted. “Oh, Mom, do I have to? Can’t I stay up just a little longer?”
Joanna shook her head. “No way. I don’t know about you, but I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow. After church and as soon as dinner is over, I have to drive all the way to Phoenix—that’s a good four-hour trip. I’d better get some sleep tonight, or I’ll doze off at the wheel.”
Folding down the covers on what she still considered to be her side of the bed, Joanna crawled in and pulled the comforter up around her chin. Climbing into the double bed was when the now familiar ache of Andy’s absence hit her anew with soul-wrenching reality.
Instead of taking the hint and heading for her own bed, Jenny simply snuggled closer. “Do you have to go to Phoenix?” she asked.
“Peoria,” Joanna corrected, fighting her way through her pain and back into the conversation. “It’s north of Phoenix, remember?” Jenny said nothing and Joanna shook her head in exasperation, “Jennifer Ann Brady, you know I have to go. We’ve been over this a million times.”
“But since you’re already elected sheriff, how come you have to take classes? If you didn’t go to the academy, they wouldn’t diselect you, would they?”
“Diselect isn’t a word,” Joanna pointed out. “But you’re right. Even if I flunked this course—which I won’t—no one is going to take my badge away.”
“Then why go? Why couldn’t you just stay home instead of going all the way up there? I want you here.”
Joanna tried to be patient. “I may have been elected sheriff,” she explained, “but I’ve never been a real police officer—a trained police officer—before. I know something about it because of Grandpa Lathrop and Daddy, but the bottom line is I know a whole lot more about selling insurance than I do about being a cop. The most important job the sheriff does is to be the department’s leader. You know what a leader is, don’t you?”
Jenny considered for a moment before she nodded. “Mrs. Mosley’s my Brownie leader.”
“Right. And what does she do?”
“She takes us on camp-outs. She shows us how to make things, like sit-upons and buddy-burners and stuff. Last week she started teaching us how to tie knots.”
“But she couldn’t teach you how to do any of those things if she didn’t already know them herself, could she?”
Jennifer shrugged. “I guess not,” she said.
“Being sheriff is just like being a troop leader,” Joanna explained. “In order to lead the department, I have to be able to show the people who work under me that I know what’s going on—that I know what I’m doing. I have to know what to do and how to do it before I can tell my officers what I expect of them. And the only way to learn all those things in a hurry is to take a crash course like the one they offer at the Arizona Police Officers Academy.”
“But why does it have to start the week before Thanksgiving?” Jenny objected. “Couldn’t it start afterward? You won’t even be back home until two days before Christmas. When will we go Christmas shopping?”
Andrew Roy Brady, Joanna’s husband and Jenny’s father, had been gunned down in mid-September and had died a day later. After ten years of marriage, this was the first holiday season Joanna would spend without him. She couldn’t very well tell Jenny how much she dreaded what was coming, starting with Thanksgiving later that week.
After all, with Andy dead, what did Joanna have to be thankful for? How could she explain to her daughter that the little house the family had lived in on Lonesome Ranch—the only home Jenny had ever known—was the very last place Joanna Brady wanted to be when it came time for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner? How would she be able to eat a celebratory dinner with an empty place in Andy’s spot at the head of the table? How could make Jenny understand how much Joanna dreaded the prospect of hauling the holiday decorations down from the tiny attic or of putting up a tree? Some words simply couldn’t be spoken.
“Thanksgiving is already under control,” Joanna said firmly. “Grandma and Grandpa Brady will bring you up to see me right after school on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll have a nice Thanksgiving dinner in the restaurant at the hotel. I won’t have to be in class again until Monday. We’ll have the whole weekend together up until Sunday afternoon. Maybe we can do some of our Christmas shopping then. We might even try visiting the Phoenix Zoo. Would you like that?”
“I guess,” Jenny answered without enthusiasm. “Why isn’t Grandma Lathrop coming along? Didn’t you ask her?”
Good question, Joanna thought. Why isn’t my mother coming along? Eleanor Lathrop had been invited to join the Thanksgiving expedition not just once, but three separate times—by Joanna and by both Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady. Eleanor had turned down each separate invitation. She claimed she had some pressing social engagement that would keep her from spending even one night away from home, to say nothing of three. Joanna had no doubt that Eleanor would have been more enthusiastic about the trip had the idea been hers originally rather than Jim Bob and Eva Lou’s. That was something else Joanna couldn’t explain to Jenny.
“I asked her, but I guess she’s just too busy,” Joanna answered lamely. With a firm but loving shove, Joanna finally booted her daughter out of bed. “Go on, now. It’s time to get in your own bed.”
Reluctantly, Jenny made her way across the room. She stopped beside the three packed and zippered suitcases. She glowered at them as if they were cause rather than result. “I liked it better when Daddy was here,” she said.
Joanna knew part of the reason Jenny didn’t want to go to her own room—part of the reason she didn’t want her mother to be away from home—stemmed from a totally understandable sense of loss. The child was still grieving, and rightfully so. And although Jenny’s blurted words weren’t meant to be hurtful to her mother, they hurt nonetheless.
Joanna winced. “So did I,” she answered.
Jenny made it as far as the bedroom door before she paused again. “Come on, you dogs,” she ordered. “Time for bed.”
Slowly Sadie and Tigger, Jenny’s two dogs, rose from their sprawled sleeping positions on the bedside rug. They both stretched languorously, then followed Jenny out of the room. When the door closed, Joanna switched off her light and then lay there in the dark, wrestling with her own feelings of loneliness and grief.