“Better’n anybody figured,” he replied. “It’s turned into a real horse race.”
Jennifer made a face. “Can’t we talk about something else?”
Why don’t you want to talk about the election, Jenn honey?” Eva Brady asked mildly. “Don’t you want your mama to win?”
“No!” And there it was. The dining room grew quiet while Jennifer’s blurted answer hung in the air like a dispirited balloon.
“That can’t be true, Jenny,” Jim Bob Brady said.
“Of course you want her to win. She’s doing it for all of us-because we need her. She’s doing it for you.”
Jennifer’s eyes flashed with defiance. “She is not She’s doing it for her.”
With that, Jennifer flung her crushed paper nap kin into her plate, shoved her chair into the wall behind her, and crashed from the table. “What in the world was that all about?” Eleanor Lathrop demanded. “Whatever’s gotten into her?”
Joanna carefully folded her own napkin. “I’d better go talk to her,” she said.
Jennifer had slammed the bedroom door shut behind her. Joanna knocked and waited.
“Come in,” Jenny said finally, reluctantly.
Her grandparents had furnished the extra bed room with Jenny specifically in mind, making it a home-away- from-home; a place where she was always welcome. A serviceable secondhand day bed sat in one corner of the room. The coverlet - a homemade quilt - was strewn with a collection of matching pillows. Jennifer lay on the bed sobbing, her head buried beneath the body of a huge brown teddy bear.
Joanna stood in the doorway, her hand on the doorknob, unsure whether or not she should enter the room. A yawning, treacherous gulf seemed to lie between her and her daughter. Had there been a time like this for her own mother? Joanna wondered. A time when Eleanor had stood frozen in a doorway wondering helplessly how to comfort her own grieving child?
Joanna noticed a shadow on the floor of the room. It looked like a tightrope stretching between the doorway and the bed, between her and her despairing, sobbing child.
Joanna’s heart caught in her throat. What would happen if she made the wrong decision? What if she somehow failed to successfully negotiate the distance between them? Would Joanna be destroying whatever relationship had once existed between herself and her daughter? Was history bound to repeat itself?
“Could I talk to you, please?” Joanna asked.
Jenny pulled the teddy bear more tightly over her head and didn’t answer.
She mued softly. “I need to know why you don’t want me to win.”
Jenny rolled over, flinging the teddy bear aside allowing her mother a glimpse of her tear-stained desolate face. “I’m afraid,” she whispered.”
Joanna resisted the temptation to close the distance between them.
This was a turning point. She needed to hear Jennifer’s answer, needed to listen to what the child had to say without smothering her in a word-strangling embrace.
“What are you afraid of?” Joanna asked.
Jennifer’s chin quivered. “That you’ll die, too,” she whispered. “That somebody will kill you, too, Just like they did Daddy. If that happens, I’ll be all alone.”
That was it. The answer when it came was so blindingly simple, so logical, that it took Joanna’s breath away. Of course! Why hadn’t she seen it coming? If she had been a better mother, a more perceptive parent, maybe she would have.
“Just because I’m elected sheriff doesn’t mean someone’s going to try to kill me.”
“But Sheriff McFadden got killed,” Jennifer returned with unwavering childish logic. “And Daddy. And Grampa.”
“Grandpa Lathrop died because he was changing a tire in traffic-because he was helping someone not because he was sheriff,” Joanna pointed out.
But even as she said the words, Joanna knew they weren’t the right ones. They didn’t address Jennifer Brady’s very real concern; didn’t do justice to her heartfelt worry. D. H. Lathrop had died by legitimately accidental means-if drunk drivers can ever be considered truly accidental. But the other two hadn’t.
Walter McFadden and Andrew Brady had both died violent deaths as soldiers in the ongoing war fare between good and evil, between wrong and right. And Jenny wasn’t mistaken in her concern.
Winning the election would put Joanna Brady directly on the front lines of that exact same conflict. As though negotiating a minefield, Joanna walked carefully to the side of the bed and settled on the edge of it with her hands folded in her lap. Still she made no attempt to touch her daughter.
“Sometimes you have to take a stand,” she said softly.
“What do you mean?”
“Your dad saw what terrible things drugs and drug dealers were doing to the people around him. He decided he had to try to stop it and…”
“And they killed him,” Jenny finished.
The room grew quiet. From the dining room came the hushed murmur of muted conversation.
“Everyone must die sometime, Jenny,” Joanna said at last. “Grandpa and Grandma Brady. Grandma Lathrop. You. Me.”
