All I knew right then was that the deputy had sat down.
He didn’t decide to. His legs just quit on him. He sat down on the back bumper of the Buick, right where she’d been standing for forty minutes, and he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t,” my mother said. “Get me out of this sun, and then you can tell me.”
The sheriff made it in five minutes.
He wasn’t alone. Dennis pulled in right behind him in a squad car. Then a red pickup with a fire department placard on the door. Then Gary in the orange county plow truck, which he parked half in the ditch at an angle like he’d been in a hurry and didn’t care who saw. Cars headed to the ice cream social came over the rise and slowed down and pulled off onto the grass, because nobody in Kessler County was going to drive past that many light bars without finding out who it was for.
