He had pulled us over eleven minutes after we left her driveway.
You have to understand something about my mother. She drives forty-eight in a fifty-five. She has driven forty-eight in a fifty-five since I was a little boy. She uses her blinker to pull out of her own yard, when there is nobody on the road for three miles. The county had sealed that stretch of County Road 6 back in July and never came back to paint the center stripe, so I honestly do not know what line he thought she had crossed.
He never told us. Not once.
He had walked up to her window with his sunglasses on. Tan uniform, the creases still sharp from the package it came in. He looked about nineteen years old. I found out later he was twenty-four, and he had been wearing that badge for eleven days.
“License and insurance.”
No good afternoon. No ma’am. Nothing.
