“Oh,” Jenny said. “Is that why you don’t want me to read it? Because it talks about lesbians? I ready knew about that from going to see Mom’s friend at the hospital yesterday. Her brother called a dyke, so I sort of figured it out.”
“Jenny!” Eleanor exclaimed, her face going pale. “What language!”
“Well, that’s what he said, didn’t he, Mom?” Joanna returned defiantly.
“So you know about lesbians then, do you, Jenny?” Bob Brundage asked, gently nudging himself into what had been only a three-way conversation.
“ ‘Course,” Jenny answered offhandedly.
“Did you learn about that from your mom or from school?” he asked, carefully avoiding the icy disapproval stamped on Eleanor Lathrop’s face “Or do the schools in Bisbee have classes in the birds and the bees?”
Knowing Eleanor’s attitude toward mealtime discussions of anything remotely off-color, Joanna observed this abrupt turn of conversation in stunned silence. What in the world was Bob Brundage thinking? she wondered. Was he deliberately baiting Eleanor by encouraging such a discussion? But of course, since Bob didn’t know Eleanor well, it was possible he had no idea of her zero-tolerance attitude toward nonparlor conversation, as she called it.
On the other hand, maybe he did. As he gazed expectantly at Jenny, awaiting her answer with rapt attention, Joanna caught what seemed to be a twinkle of amusement glinting in his eyes. I’ll be, Joanna thought. He’s doing it on purpose.
At that precise moment, she made the mistake of taking a tiny sip of water.
“Mom told me some of it,” Jenny said seriously. “But we mostly learn about it in school, along with AIDS and all that other icky stuff. Except we don’t call it the birds and the bees.”
Bob Brundage raised a questioning eyebrow. “You don’t? What do you call it, then?”
Jenny sighed. “When it’s about men and women, we call it the birds and the bees. But when it’s about men and men or women and women, we call it the birds and the birds.”
“I see,” Bob Brundage said, nodding and smiling.
“Jennifer Ann!” Eleanor gasped, while Joanna choked on the water, sending a very undignified and unladylike spray out of her mouth and nose into a hastily grabbed napkin. When she looked up at last, Bob Brundage winked at her again.
“Such goings-on!” Eleanor said, shaking her head. “And in front of company, too. Jenny, you should be ashamed of yourself.” Eleanor picked up the newspaper and handed it over to a still-coughing Joanna. “If you’re willing to let your daughter see this kind of filth at her tender age, then you’re going to have to be the one to give it to her. I certainly won’t be a party to it.”
Joanna took the paper and stuffed it into her purse.
“And you’d better decide what you want to order,” Eleanor continued. “Bob and I have already made up our minds. We had plenty of time to study the menus before you got here.”
Obligingly, Joanna picked up her menu and began looking at it. She held it high enough that it concealed her mouth where the corners of her lips kept curving up into an irrepressible smile.
Bob Brundage may have been a colonel in the United States Army, but he was also an inveterate tease. Even now, while Joanna studied the menu, he managed to elicit another tiny giggle of laughter from Eleanor Lathrop, although the previous flap had barely ended.
To Joanna’s surprise, instead of still being angry, Eleanor was smiling and gazing fondly at Bob Brundage. Her doting eyes seemed to caress him, lingering on him as if trying to memorize every feature of his face, every detail of the way he held his coffee cup or moved his hand.
And while Eleanor studied Bob Brundage, Joanna studied her mother. That adoring look seemed to come from someone totally different from the woman Joanna had always known her mother to be. Gazing at her long-lost son, Eleanor seemed softer somehow, more relaxed. With a shock, Joanna realized that Eva Lou Brady had been right all along. Eleanor was different because there was a new man in her life. In all their lives.
“What can I get you?” a waitress asked.
How about a little baked crow? Joanna wondered. “I’ll have the tuna sandwich on white and a cup of soup,” she said. “What kind of soup is it?”
“Turkey noodle,” the waitress said. “What else would it be? After all, it is the day after Thanksgiving, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “It certainly is.”
The remainder of the meal passed uneventfully. When it was over, Joanna said her good-byes to both Bob Brundage and to her mother while standing in the Hohokam’s spacious lobby. “You’re sure you don’t want to stay another night, Mother?”
“Heavens no. I have to get back home.”
Joanna turned to Bob Brundage. They stood looking at one another awkwardly. Neither of them seemed to know what to do or say. Finally, Joanna held out her hand. “It’s been nice meeting you,” she said.
The words seemed wooden and hopelessly inadequate, but with Eleanor looking on anxiously, it was the best Joanna could do.
“Same here,” he returned.
Jenny, unaffected by grown-up awkwardness, suffered no such restraint. When Bob Brundage bent down to her level, she grabbed him around the neck and planted a hearty kiss on his tanned cheek. “I hope you come back to visit again,” she said. “I want you to meet Tigger and Sadie.”
“We’ll see,” Bob Brundage said, smiling and ruffling her frizzy hair. “We’ll have to see about that.”
Back in the room, Ceci and Jenny disappeared into the bathroom to change into bathing suits, while Joanna extracted Eleanor’s folded newspaper from her purse. She wasted no time in searching out the article Eleanor Lathrop had forbidden her granddaughter to read:
A Tempe police officer was seriously injured early Thanksgiving morning and a former longtime Chandler area police officer is dead in the aftermath of what investigators are calling a bizarre kidnapping/suicide plot.
After being kidnapped from her dormitory room at the Arizona Police Officers Academy in Peoria, Officer Leann Jessup jumped from a moving vehicle at the intersection of Olive and Grand avenues while attempting to escape from her assailant. A carload of passing teenagers, coming home from a party, narrowly avoided hitting the gravely injured woman when her partially clad body tumbled from a moving pickup and landed on the pavement directly in front of them.
Two of the youths followed the speeding pickup and managed to provide information that led investigators back to the APOA campus itself and to David Willis Thompson, a former Chandler police officer who has been the on-site director of the statewide law enforcement training facility for the past several years.
Thompson’s body was discovered on the campus later on yesterday afternoon. He was found in a vehicle inside a closed garage, where he is thought to have committed suicide. Investigation into cause of death is continuing, and an autopsy has been scheduled.
Meantime, Leann Jessup is listed in serious but stable condition at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where she underwent surgery yesterday for a skull fracture and where she is being treated for numerous cuts and abrasions.
Thompson, a longtime Chandler police officer, left the force there under a cloud in the aftermath of a serious altercation with his estranged wife in which both she and a female friend were injured.
In this latest incident, the injured woman and Cochise County Sheriff, Joanna Brady, were the only women enrolled in a class of twenty-five attending this session of the Arizona Police Officers Academy, an interdepartmental training facility that attracts newly hired police officers from jurisdictions all over the state. Sources close to the case say there is some reason to believe that Ms. Brady was also in danger.
Melody Daviddottir, local spokeswoman for the National Lesbian Legal Defense Organization, the group that was instrumental in forcing Thompson’s ouster from the Chandler Department of Public Safety, said that it was unfortunate that a man with so many problems could be placed in a position of responsibility where he was likely to encounter lesbian women or women of any kind.