Their friendship had started with their first day in seventh grade at Lowell School. During lunch recess, one of the boys had made the mistake of calling Marianne Maculyea a half-breed. Marianne’s Hispanic mother and Irish father had met and married in Bisbee at a time when such unions were regarded with a good deal of disapproval. Marianne’s two younger brothers had inherited both their mother’s lustrous dark hair and brown eyes. Like her brothers, Marianne had come away with Evangeline Maculyea’s hair, but that was combined with Timothy Maculyea’s arresting gray eyes as well as his volatile temper.
The half-breed comment had been a typical grade school taunt, delivered with casual indifference and with zero expectation of consequence. What Marianne’s hit-and-run tormentor failed to realize was that Marianne Maculyea was a confirmed tomboy and the fastest sprinter ever to come out of Horace Mann Grade School up the canyon in Old Bisbee. The boy-a year older and half a head taller than his victim-never anticipated that she would turn on him in pint-sized fury, chase him to the far end of the playground, capture him by his flapping shirttail, and then proceed to beat the crap out of him. Joanna Lathrop, a fellow seventh grader and also a confirmed tomboy, witnessed the whole drama, cheering for Marianne at the top of her lungs. Once Marianne escaped her sentence of detention in the principal’s office, Joanna had been the first to offer her congratulations. They had been best friends ever since.
The Maculyeas had moved to Safford by the time Marianne announced her intention of leaving the Catholic Church to become a Methodist minister. Eventually, Marianne had been appointed pastor of Canyon Methodist Church. When she returned to town, bringing along her easygoing husband, Jeff Daniels, the two women had resumed their long-term friendship as though the ten intervening years of separation had never existed.
“You look like you’ve been through a meat grinder,” Marianne said as Joanna sat down across from her and slid wearily across the booth’s sagging orange bench seat.
“I’m sorry it shows that much,” Joanna said with a rueful shake of her head. “But meat grinder just about covers it. Actually, slaughter of the Christians might be more apt.”
Joanna paused long enough to study Marianne’s face. Usually, Marianne Maculyea’s whole being radiated a kind of glowing confidence. Today the glow was missing completely. Marianne’s tan skin had a sallow look to it. The sparkle had disappeared from her eyes.
“Besides,” Joanna added. “Who’s calling the kettle black? You don’t look all that chipper yourself.”
“You’ve got me,” Marianne said with a grin.
Daisy Maxwell, the cafe’s rail-thin, seventy-year-old owner, plunked an empty cup and saucer down in front of Joanna. Knowing her regular clientele’s habits and preferences, Daisy poured two cups of coffee from the regular pot without having to ask if coffee was what they both wanted.
“It’s Tuesday,” she announced, setting the pot down on the table and pulling a pencil from her towering beehive hairdo and a tablet of tickets from the pocket of her uniform. “The lunch special today is two tacos with a side of beans. That, or meat loaf and gravy.”
Joanna and Marianne both ordered tacos.
“You go first,” Marianne said, once Daisy had taken the pot and their order and headed back to the kitchen. “What’s going on?”
“If the board of supervisors wanted me to do a seven and-a-half percent across-the-board budget cut,” Joanna groused, “why didn’t they tell me that
Marianne smiled at Joanna over the top of her coffee cup. “Sounds like loaves and fishes time. You’ll just have to take what you have and make it stretch.”
“Right,” Joanna said. “But how? They won’t let me move any of the money from one category to another. According to Melanie Hastings, the funds used to pay for the cars came out of the capital-improvement budget. That money had to he spent for the vehicles or we would have lost it entirely. According to her, those figures were frozen. So here I sit with ten brand new cars in a department where I’m expected to gel by with two fewer deputies to drive them. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Since when do bureaucracies have to make sense, Joanna?” Marianne asked.
Joanna sat back in the booth. “All right now,” she said. “Your turn.”
Marianne shrugged. “Same song, second verse. Bureaucracies are the same all over.”
“The adoption people?” Joanna asked.
Marianne nodded. “That’s right,” she said.
Jeff Daniels, Marianne’s career homemaker husband, had left for China the day after Christmas on what was supposed to be a two-week expedition to bring home an orphaned baby girl. Those two weeks had stretched into three and now al-most four, with no end in sight.
“What do you hear from Jeff?” Joanna asked.
“Not much,” Marianne replied. “I talked to him last night. He said there’s lots of coal dust in the air. I’m worried sick.”
Joanna frowned. “How come? Is Jeff allergic to it or some-thing?”
“It’s code,” Marianne explained. “We talked to some of the other parents who’ve gone through this same agency. They warned us that the Chinese authorities sometimes monitor phone calls, so before we left, Jeff and I established a code. The orphanage is located in Chengdu. People there mostly burn coal for heat, so in the winter especially the whole city is hazy with smoke and soot. The coal dust gets into everything.
“Since visiting Americans always complain about the coal dust, Jeff’s talking about it on the phone shouldn’t worry the authorities, but it does me. It means trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know, but he did tell me that he’s got to have more money. I spent the rest of the night worrying about where I’m going to get it.”
“How much more money does he think he’ll need?” Joanna asked.
Marianne sighed. “Five thousand dollars.”
Joanna whistled. “That sounds like a lot.”
“It is,” Marianne told her. “It’s exactly double what we’d been told to expect. What I’m afraid is that the authorities have changed their minds. Maybe the baby is sick and they don’t want to release her. From what Jeff said, it sounds as though, if we don’t come up with the extra money, they won’t let us have her.”
“What are you going to do?” Joanna asked.
“There’s a special board of directors meeting going on up at the church right now. I’ve asked them to advance me the money. Jeff told me last night that he needs it right away. Today, if possible. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Jeff and Marianne, almost thirty and childless not by choice, had been on several potential adoption lists for years. Andy Brady’s sudden death the previous fall had infused a whole new urgency into the process. When the possibility of adopting a little girl from China had presented itself, they had jumped at the chance.
Having both of them fly across the Pacific to pick up the baby had turned out to be prohibitively expensive, so they had opted for Jeff to go on his own. That somewhat unorthodox behavior-the idea of having an adoptive father show tip to collect the baby rather than an adoptive mother-had proved to be a real stumbling block. What had seemed like a perfectly sensible idea to Jeff and Marianne-having the primary caregiver pick up the baby-seemed somehow suspect in the eyes of officials in the Chinese orphanage. For weeks now, they had been throwing up one obstacle after another.
“Do you think it would help if you were there?” Joanna asked.
Marianne shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “Besides, having me there would make it far more expensive. It would only complicate things that much more. We’d be having to worry about my schedule and about finding someone to substitute for me while I was gone. At least this way, Jeff’s time is totally his own.”
With a disconsolate Marianne staring into her almost empty coffee cup, Joanna tried to offer some words of encouragement.
“Come on,” she said. “Jeff Daniels may seem like the most mild-mannered guy on earth, but that’s only on the surface. Once he gets his back up, you know as well as I do that he’ll shrivel up into a little old man before he’ll
