The police badges in front of me glinted in the buzzing, fluorescent light. I was at 1711 Miner Street, standing at the counter, waiting to see if I had to flash my tits to get any one of these old boys’ attention. Debby knew me good though, and she kept telling me to let her handle it in tiny, scratchy whispers. I was letting her. I didn’t like it much, as being nice or patient was against my nature, but I’d come to understand in life that there were times you had to shut your goddamn mouth to get what you wanted. And I had begun to want this, bad. I prayed to the heavy metal gods—and most specifically to the heavy metal god, Dave Mustaine—that this shit would work out in my favor, and something helpful about my mom would come up.
Finally, after Debby had smiled and said hello super brightly enough times, a short, white man with a handlebar mustache came by, his gut poking up and over his belt. He was, as Debby would put it, peak Idaho Springs.
“Help you, ladies?” he said, glancing over at me uneasily. I couldn’t blame him. I always looked like trouble in my dark T-shirts and black jeans, and in my younger days, I’d been in here plenty on misdemeanors. Hell, he might’ve cuffed me once, and not in that good way. He was probably related to me on Debby’s side too. Half the white folks in this town were second or third cousins. It was like a Rez. Though unlike a Rez—or like Indians everywhere I’d ever been—they didn’t refer to each other as cousins.
“Hi, Officer! Bob, right? You remember me! Jack’s wife?” Debby said.
At the mention of Jack’s name, I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. He had apologized for going out and leaving her alone with the kids and taken us all out to breakfast. He did this kind of thing a lot. Debby’s house was covered in thoughtful little trinkets. Cheap silver bracelets. Tiny porcelain cats.
Debby smiled brightly, like she had a pink lamé baton in one hand. She was wearing a different sparkle-themed T-shirt today. This one said, DADDY’S LIL’ PRINCESS. Ironic, as Debby’s dad hadn’t been around since she was a kid.
The officer blinked a few times and then nodded. “Derby?”
“That’s right! We’ve had drinks at the Derby!” she said, like she was encouraging a small child to use the toilet for the first time.
“Right,” he said, one hand going to his mustache, and twisting.
Debby giggled happily, and I resisted the urge to roll my eyes again. This was why I worked at dive bars like the Hangar Bar, and places where I didn’t have to be all sunshine and happiness, though I had to be at least passably nice at Lucille’s. I hated this kind of shit.
Just then, Debby’s phone rang—the tone a few bars from Britney’s Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U,” and I knew it was Jack, wondering where she was, wondering if she was with me. He was such a douche. Couldn’t he wash his own fucking boxers for once? Every time he did something nice, he just had to follow it up with some bullshit.
“My cousin here,” Debby started, glancing down at her phone nervously and placing it on silent, “her mother disappeared when she was just two days old. Isn’t that sad?” Officer Bob squinted in confusion, my light-brown skin contrasting brightly with Debby’s white.
He just stood there, silent. I could’ve sworn I spied donut crumbs on the end of one side of his mustache.
“And her dad, well, he didn’t take it well. Got into an accident not long after.”
Nothing.
“And so, she just wants to know if there were any missing persons filed on her mom, or even,” and here, Debby stopped to shake her head tragically, “any death certificates. Just so that she could know for sure.”
“ID?” he said. “Phone number?”
Finally, something from Officer Bob.
I pulled my wallet out of my black, fringe faux-leather purse, and handed my ID over. Gave him my number.
“May take some time,” he said.
“Any chance you can speed it up? Jack always talks about how wonderful the men in this station are.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “Take a seat.”
About thirty minutes later, after Debby had forced me to look at a bunch of mainly cat-themed memes on Facebook, to my great surprise, the all-powerful Bob came out from behind the counter and over to us.
“Got a death certificate and a few other things—she was presumed dead on account of no remains being found.”
“Thank you so much, Officer! I’ll tell Jack how wonderful you were to us,” she said, nearly squealing as he walked back around to the counter.
“Could you lay it on any thicker?” I said. “Shit.”
“I got us what we wanted in thirty minutes, you curmudgeon.”
I supposed that was true. I sat up, and we pored over the thin file. Nothing much. Nothing helpful at all in fact. Just a certificate that presumed her death, like Bob had said—showing that she’d been born in Denver—and a missing person’s report, filed by my dad.
“Dammit, I was so hoping there’d be something that could lead us somewhere,” Debby said. Her phone started ringing again, and she set to texting.
I’d hoped so too. We got up to go.
Just as we were about to leave, I felt eyes on my back. I turned around. There was an older officer in plainclothes staring at me by the watercooler, his hair gray, his face showing years of dealing with the kind of shit one deals with in this small, hurt little town. He wasn’t getting any water, either. Just staring, hard. I nodded. He nodded back. And I left with a strange, echoing feeling throughout my body, though I knew that might just be the heady, buzzy exhaustion I’d been living with since that first visitation.