Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

He tilted his head to one side and gestured for her to keep going.

"I'm sorry, sir, but if you're looking for Robocop, I'm not the right person. I guess I see policing as sort of like being a mom. I don't want to catch my kids doing something wrong. I want to stop 'em before they do it. Or head them off before a little problem becomes a big one." He was looking at her with an expression she couldn't define. She snapped her mouth shut. Policing is like being a mom. Great. Maybe she should tell him she wanted to knit scarves and serve hot cocoa.

"If you're hired, you'll be the only woman sworn into the department. The first woman, actually." There was an edge of discomfort in his voice, but she couldn't tell whether it was from the prospect of letting a girl into the club or embarrassment that they hadn't integrated the force up to now. "Have you thought about how you'll handle that?"

He had said he wanted her to give it to him straight. "Are the men in your department likely to require handling?"

"No. Well…"-he pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his steel-rimmed glasses-"not most of 'em, of course not. I was referring to the job itself. It's not like guard work. You'll be doing traffic stops, pulling apart guys who've had too much to drink, walking into houses where the husband and wife have been beating up on each other. You'll be shorter and lighter than any other officer here. How do you deal with that?"

That was a question she had prepped for. "Just like I did as corrections officer. The trick is to never, ever, let them think you're vulnerable. That means controlling the situation, and that starts right up here." She tapped her temple. "It doesn't matter how big you are if you can't project control. And if it comes down to using force, I have an advantage your other officers don't. The drunk guys see these"-she thrust her forearm beneath her breasts and hoisted them, and sure enough, his eyes followed-"and they don't see me coming in with this." She touched the side of his head lightly with the magazine she had picked up with her free hand.

He let out a short laugh. "It's not always that simple."

"Nope. But men still tend to underestimate women."

His smile changed to something wistful. "Yeah. I know-I knew -a woman who used to take advantage of that fact."

"Did it work for her?"

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, it did…" He shook himself. "Okay." His voice was once again no-nonsense. "If you want it, you've got the job."

"I do? I mean, great! Yes! I do want it."

"You'll be on probation until you've completed the Basic course. I don't want to throw away the time and money we're going to spend training you, so I expect you to pass. With high marks."

"I will. I'll be in the top ten percent. You won't be disappointed."

"Plus, you'll have to put in some serious time on the firing range." He tapped the folder, which he still hadn't opened. "The scores from your shooting test are way too low."

"Absolutely," she said. "That won't be a problem."

Van Alstyne stood up. Hadley stood up. He held out his hand and she took it. "Welcome to the Millers Kill Police Department, Officer Knox."

A rap on his door kept her from gushing her thanks. The dispatcher, a square stack of a woman with an iron-gray perm, stuck her head in. "If you're all finished, Ms. Knox has a phone call."

"Me?" She looked at Van Alstyne. He waved her off.

"Go ahead. Harlene here can set you up with the paperwork."

Harlene closed the door behind them and surprised Hadley by dragging her past the dispatch room into the hallway. "You don't actually have a call. It's a message. From St. Alban's." As she said this, she glanced around, as if ensuring no one could hear her. "It's your grandfather. He's been taken to the Glens Falls Hospital with a heart attack. Reverend Fergusson's going to fetch your kids over to the church."

Hadley stood there. "I'm sorry. Did you say-" and then her mind caught up to Harlene's words and her eyes flooded. "Oh, shit," she said. "Oh, shit."

Harlene was saying something about Glens Falls not necessarily meaning it was bad, and that she wasn't to worry about her children, and all Hadley could think was that she had uprooted their lives and come three thousand miles and now her granddad was going to die and she'd be on her own again. All on her own. Again.

"Don't take your coat off. We're going to your sister's for dinner."

Russ paused by the coat hooks in his mom's kitchen, halfway out of his jacket. "That's okay," he said. "I don't feel much like socializing."

Margy Van Alstyne marched out of the tiny dining room. Cousin Nane must have been over with the home perming kit-her white hair was curled so tightly it looked as if it could power the entire North Country electrical grid if you could figure out a way to release its chemical energy. She braced her hands on her hips, increasing her resemblance to a fireplug. "It in't socializing when it's family."

"I'm tired. It's been a long day. Give Janet my regrets." He shrugged the jacket off and hung it on a hook. His mother grabbed its collar and thrust it back at him.

"Mom!"

"I want you to drive me. It'll be dark coming back, and I don't like to drive in the dark."

"Since when?"

"A woman of seventy-five has the right to develop a few little quirks. Now, are you going to take me, or are you going to sit here in my house, eating food I've made, with your big feet up on my hassock watching my television?"

He glowered down at her. "Now you're trying to guilt me into going."

"You're darned right I am. Is it working?"

He took the jacket. He had been living at her house since his wife died. No, since before. He had moved in with his mom when Linda had thrown him out of their house in what he had thought was going to be a temporary separation. It had become a permanent and irrevocable separation two weeks later, with her death. Her stupid, senseless, preventable death.

He couldn't stand to go back to his own house, and he couldn't stand to sell it, so he puttered along in limbo, buying groceries, fixing odds and ends, paying Mom's bills when he could get hold of them before she did. She hadn't asked him how long he was staying or what he was going to do. She hadn't asked anything of him.

"All right." He jammed an arm back into his jacket. "I'll take you. And I'll pick you up. But I'm not staying for dinner."

"We'll see about that."

In his pickup, she chattered on about Janet and Mike's girls, and about Cousin Nane, and about the latest meeting of her antiwar group, Women in Black. He let her words wash over and around him, as unnoticed as the late-afternoon sun slanting through chinks in the clouds or the faint green traces of spring emerging from the last clutches of winter's gray and brown tangle. It was all part of a world that kept moving and changing, and he didn't want anything to do with it.

They passed an enormous Hummer, pimped to the nines and radiating a bass line that rattled his windows. "Those vehicles ought to be illegal," his mom huffed, and then she was on about greenhouse gases and blood for oil and American entitlement. Same-old same-old. In the dips and hollows, where snow still covered the ground, a thick white mist hovered knee-high, like a company of ghosts unable to break the bonds of earth.

He was startled into awareness by guitar strings thrumming their way out of the cab's speakers. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Well, since you weren't listenin' to me, I thought you might like to hear some music instead."

He reached over and snapped the CD player off. "No," he said. "No music."

His mother looked at him. "No music."

"I don't like listening to music."

"Since when?"

Since my life went straight into the crapper. Since every other goddam song makes me think of Clare . He did not say what he was thinking. He had a great deal of practice, each and every day, in not saying what he was thinking. Instead, he said, "A man of fifty has the right to develop a few little quirks."