“It’s Saturday the eighth, Deputy,” she said. “The social starts at two.”
He looked at her a second longer, the way you look at a dog that won’t come when you call it. Then he went back to his truck and sat down again in the cold air.
A grain truck came up from the east. It slowed way down passing us. The driver had his elbow out the window and his mouth hanging open, staring at an old woman in a church dress standing behind her car in that heat.
My mother lifted two fingers off her handbag. Just barely. The way you wave somebody through at a four-way stop.
Go on.
The truck went on.
At thirty minutes, she asked him a question. He had cracked his window by then, maybe two inches. She walked three steps toward his truck and stopped a polite distance away.
