“Is that so wrong?”
“It’s just . . .”
“Look,” Butch said. “Your father died when you were fifteen—just a kid. He had no way of knowing that years in the future you’d follow him into law enforcement. Yes, if you read the journals, you’ll learn a lot about him, but you know what else? You’ll also learn a lot about you. In addition, you’ll have the benefit of some very wise fatherly advice, not only about how to be a parent but also about how to be a cop. So here’s what I say—keep on reading. And you know what else? I may just take a page out of your father’s book and start doing the same thing—keeping a journal. Not in a leather-bound book—more likely on the computer. And why would I do that? Because one of these days, once I’m gone and you’re gone and there’s no one left to tell our story, Sage and Denny and maybe even Jenny will be able to learn something about us that they didn’t know before.”
Butch paused then, as if to take a breath. “Oops,” he added, finally noticing from Joanna’s long silence that he’d been in full-on rant mode. “Did I go too far and step in it?”
Butch seldom had that much to say, but on those rare occasions when he did, Joanna had learned to pay attention.
“No,” she told him. “I don’t think you went too far at all.”
When I was growing up, what I wanted more than anything was to be a Texas Ranger, because being a Texas Ranger was the exact opposite of anything my worthless father would ever be or do.
When I left home and came to Arizona, hoping to work in the mines, that’s one of the reasons I settled on Bisbee—because this is where Texas John Slaughter came. Cochise County felt like the Old West to me. Tombstone was here—the town too tough to die. The shoot-out at the O.K. Corral was here, and so were Wyatt Earp and the Clanton Gang. I wanted to be part of it.
Last week I saw an ad in the paper that the sheriff’s department is hiring. I’m close to the top of the age bracket to get in, so it’s pretty much now or never. When I checked out the pay scale, I can see it would mean a big drop in pay compared to what I make working underground. Ellie and I would have to cut corners, of course, but we could probably make it. When I mentioned it to Ellie, she hit the roof. Why would I even think of giving up a sure thing like working in the mines to go to work as a cop?
Except that’s what I’ve always wanted to do—be a cop, and if I can keep the bills paid and food on the table, why the hell not? Yes, Ellie’s my wife, but why should she get to say where I spend eight hours a day of my life for the next umpteen years? Because working underground in the dark is not a walk in the park. It’s a dirty, mind-numbing, soul-killing job. Sure, there’s a lot of high jinks and joking around and banter and stuff, but the guys in the stopes sure as hell don’t want their kids working underground. They want them to go on to college and get an education and make something of themselves. Do as I say, not as I do.
If we still had our son, I’m sure I’d feel exactly the same way and do everything in my power to keep him from choosing “the sure thing.” I’d want to encourage him to go after what he wants to do—what makes him happy rather than what pays the bills.
But of course we don’t have our son. He’s forever lost to us. We don’t have any kids at all and most likely never will, so again, why shouldn’t I do what I want to do?
I don’t think this is the kind of discussion Ellie expected me to have when she gave me this journal and told me to “talk to the book.” But it turns out that talking to the book is helping me. It’s making me think about stuff that I might not think about otherwise.
The deadline for applications is next week. We’ll see what happens.
Unable to read any further, Joanna closed the book, turned off the lamp, and sat in the quiet darkness of the living room, thinking. Lady, Joanna’s rescued Australian shepherd, lay on the sofa beside her while Jenny’s deaf black Lab, Lucky, sprawled at her feet. With Jenny away at school, Lucky now literally dogged Joanna’s heels wherever she went.
Absently stroking Lady’s soft coat, Joanna realized that in reading that passage she had just caught a glimpse of her father on the cusp of making a life-and-death decision, and one that had indeed cost him his life years later. It was the same decision Joanna herself had made nine years earlier, and the circumstances of their separate decision-making processes couldn’t have been more different.
At the time her father had been a married man—for all intents and purposes a childless married man—with no hint that another child, Joanna, would ever come into his life. He had entered law enforcement as the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition. His working underground had been a chore, one he had done out of duty—to support the woman who’d given up so much to marry him—and he’d gone into law enforcement over her express objections. Being a deputy was something D. H. Lathrop had wanted, something Eleanor had not.
Joanna had landed in law enforcement almost by accident—not because it was what she’d always wanted to do. She hadn’t chosen that profession because her father had been a cop, and not exactly because her husband had been a cop, either. Her first husband, Andrew Roy Brady, had been a deputy sheriff who had gone to war with his boss at the time, Sheriff Walter McFadden. Andy had decided to run for office against what he regarded to be a corrupt administration, Joanna had supported his effort without really understanding how deep the corruption ran or how dangerous it could be.
When candidate Andrew Brady was gunned down in a hail of bullets and subsequently died, Joanna hadn’t even considered the idea that she might run for office in his place. She didn’t remember for sure if it was at Andy’s funeral or at the reception afterward when someone had first broached the subject of her taking up Andy’s cause and running for office in his place.
At first it seemed like a joke to her. She was a widow—a single mother with a nine-year-old child. And yet after more and more people asked her, she finally agreed—not because she thought she’d win, not because she had wanted to win, and certainly not out of an overriding desire to be sheriff. It had simply seemed right somehow. And when she finally did win, that had seemed right, too.
Now she was sheriff in the same way her father, D. H. Lathrop, had been sheriff. He’d earned it, and so had she—by doing the job. And that’s how she thought of herself now—as a sheriff rather than as a wife or a mother or a woman or anything else for that matter. Where had that come from? Was it in her DNA? Had D. H. Lathrop bequeathed his own law-enforcement ambitions to his daughter? Was that her inheritance?
And that being the case, what kind of inheritance was Joanna leaving her own children?
A tiny wail of protest from Sage’s nursery indicated it was time for one final round of nursing and diaper changing before Joanna could go to bed. It was also time for her to stop ruminating about being a sheriff or a wife or a daughter and concentrate on being a mother.
Chapter 7
THE VOICES OF THE OTHER GIRLS HAD OFFERED SOME SMALL MEASURE of comfort in the darkness. They told one another stories; kept one another company. After Amelia showed up, she sometimes sang to them. Her songs were always in Spanish. She said they were ones she had learned from her grandmother. Latisha hadn’t understood a word of them, but Amelia had a pretty voice, and Latisha liked hearing her sing.