lump that mysteriously filled throat. “I always liked that one, too,” she managed.
Joanna usually thought of Jenny as resembling Andy far more than she did her mother’s side of the family, but studying the photo closely, she could see that Jenny and the little girl in the twenty-two-year-old picture might have been sisters.
“How come none of these are in color?” Jenny asked. “They look funny. Like pictures in a museum.”
“Because Grandpa Lathrop developed them himself,” Joanna answered. “In that room below the stairs in Grandma Lathrop’s basement. That was his darkroom. He always said he liked working in black and white better than he did in color.”
Carefully, Joanna began gathering the scattered photos, returning them to the familiar shoe box that had been their storage place for as many years she could remember. “Come on now,” she urged. “It’s time to go to bed in your own room.”
Jenny pouted. “Oh, Mom, do I have to? Can’t I stay up just a little longer?”
Joanna shook her head. “No way. I don’t know about you, but I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow. After church and as soon as dinner is over, I have to drive all the way to Phoenix—that’s a good four-hour trip. I’d better get some sleep tonight, or I’ll doze off at the wheel.”
Folding down the covers on what she still considered to be her side of the bed, Joanna crawled in and pulled the comforter up around her chin. Climbing into the double bed was when the now familiar ache of Andy’s absence hit her anew with soul-wrenching reality.
Instead of taking the hint and heading for her own bed, Jenny simply snuggled closer. “Do you have to go to Phoenix?” she asked.
“Peoria,” Joanna corrected, fighting her way through her pain and back into the conversation. “It’s north of Phoenix, remember?” Jenny said nothing and Joanna shook her head in exasperation, “Jennifer Ann Brady, you know I have to go. We’ve been over this a million times.”
“But since you’re already elected sheriff, how come you have to take classes? If you didn’t go to the academy, they wouldn’t diselect you, would they?”
“Diselect isn’t a word,” Joanna pointed out. “But you’re right. Even if I flunked this course—which I won’t—no one is going to take my badge away.”
“Then why go? Why couldn’t you just stay home instead of going all the way up there? I want you here.”
Joanna tried to be patient. “I may have been elected sheriff,” she explained, “but I’ve never been a real police officer—a trained police officer—before. I know something about it because of Grandpa Lathrop and Daddy, but the bottom line is I know a whole lot more about selling insurance than I do about being a cop. The most important job the sheriff does is to be the department’s leader. You know what a leader is, don’t you?”
Jenny considered for a moment before she nodded. “Mrs. Mosley’s my Brownie leader.”
“Right. And what does she do?”
“She takes us on camp-outs. She shows us how to make things, like sit-upons and buddy-burners and stuff. Last week she started teaching us how to tie knots.”
“But she couldn’t teach you how to do any of those things if she didn’t already know them herself, could she?”
Jennifer shrugged. “I guess not,” she said.
“Being sheriff is just like being a troop leader,” Joanna explained. “In order to lead the department, I have to be able to show the people who work under me that I know what’s going on—that I know what I’m doing. I have to know what to do and how to do it before I can tell my officers what I expect of them. And the only way to learn all those things in a hurry is to take a crash course like the one they offer at the Arizona Police Officers Academy.”
