The Dispatch Log My Mother Forgot

The lights in my mirror

I was eleven miles from the courthouse when the red and blue lights came up behind me on County Road 9.

I remember exactly where I was, because I had driven that stretch of road ten thousand times in my life. Past the Vandenberg place with the leaning corn crib. Past the little white Lutheran church where my grandmother’s funeral had been. Past the grain elevator that stands over our town of Ash Grove like the only tall thing for forty miles. I knew every dip and frost heave in that road the way you know the sound of your own screen door.

So when the lights came up, my first thought was not fear. My first thought was that somebody must be in a hurry to get around me, and I eased toward the shoulder to let them by.

They did not go by.

They stayed in my mirror, close and steady, and then the short whoop of a siren told me the truth. This was for me.

I put on my blinker. I slowed my grandfather’s old Ford down onto the gravel apron by the ditch, gently, the way he taught me, so the tires would not slide. I put it in park. I set both my hands on the top of the wheel where a deputy could see them, because my grandfather taught me that too, back when I was sixteen and shaking on this same road with a learner’s permit in my pocket.

Then I looked at the clock on the dash.

Eight forty-one in the morning.

The hearing was at nine thirty.

I told myself there was time. A taillight, maybe. A registration sticker. A quick word and a wave and I would be back on the road with room to spare. I had left the farm early on purpose, because I had known, somewhere down deep, that my mother would try something. I just had not guessed what.

In the mirror I watched the deputy sit in his car a long minute, running my plate. When he got out and walked up along the driver’s side, I rolled my window down and kept my hands where they were and made my voice as pleasant as a church greeting.

“Morning, Officer.”

He was young. Maybe thirty. A square jaw and a careful way of standing, half a step back from my door, one hand loose near his belt. His name tag said Reyes. I did not know him, which meant he was probably new to the county, because in Ash County you know most of the deputies by their first names and half of them by their mothers.

“Ma’am,” he said. “I need you to keep your hands where they are for me. Is this your vehicle?”

“It was my grandfather’s,” I said. “It’s mine now. Or it will be, by about ten o’clock this morning, if I can get where I’m going.”

He did not smile.

“I’m going to need to see your license and registration,” he said. “And I need to ask you to step out of the vehicle when you’ve got those for me.”

Step out.

That was when the first real thread of cold went through me. You do not ask somebody to step out of the truck for a taillight.