“Scared shitless.” Dolly turned her squad car back toward Leetsville, pulling out onto US-131 and heading south. The car was hot and smelly. This hot spell had been going on for a couple of weeks now. It was the time of year when I began praying for rain, even a couple of cool nights. “That’s what the guy is.”
I rolled my window all the way down and leaned back against the hairy seat, grateful for the fresh air, no matter how overheated. Anything was better than the smell of Dolly’s car which must have been inhabited recently by a sour old drunk, a sick old drunk, and maybe a couple of teens chewing cinnamon gum.
I sighed. “Sometimes migrant workers are not comfortable around authority figures like you. Could be an illegal. That would make him a little difficult to communicate with.”
“Don’t think Josh Sutter would have an illegal on his place. Said the guy had been coming back for ten years or more.”
“Still, you don’t know for sure.”
Her radio crackled and Chief Lucky Barnard launched into a message.
“I gotta leave, Dolly. Charley’s got a doctor’s appointment …”
Lucky’s son had been sick for a couple of years. He came first in Lucky’s life. Everyone in Leetsville knew and tried to keep their real emergencies to days when Charley was feeling good.
“On my way in,” she answered.
“How’d it go with Sutter?” he asked, voice cracking.
“Okay, I guess. The guy Josh Sutter wanted us to see was awfully nervous. Emily Kincaid thinks it’s because I’m a cop.”
“Could be. She still with you?”
“Yeah,” I called out. “I’m here.”
“How ya doin’, Emily?” We exchanged a few more pleasantries and he was back to business with Dolly.
“Get your report on my desk by morning, okay? I got to call Brent or that Winston guy and see if there’s anything new on their end. I’m getting a strange feeling about this case. It could go a lot deeper than we’re thinking.”
He signed off and Dolly hit the steering wheel with the pad of her hand.
“Damn it to hell. More paperwork. Wish he’d just let me write it up my own way and give it to ’im. A form for this. Form for that. Be a lot more productive if I didn’t have to fill out forms all the time.”
I broke into the tirade. “Mind stopping at the IGA before you take me home? I need canning lids. I promised Harry. We’re going fishing tomorrow.”
“You’re actually going to can fish?”
“He said it’s good.”
“Yeah, that’s from a man who eats roadkill.”
I sighed. “Just stop, will you? I need some groceries, unless you want to go have lunch at EATS.”
“I don’t go there much any more. Too nosey for my tastes. Always gettin’ into my business. Decided I’d just stay away for a while. Cate likes cooking anyway.”
“They’re worried about you.”
“Why?” She made a face at me.
“Eugenia thinks there’s something going on.” My back was itching from the seat cover, hairy bits sticking through my light cotton shirt. I moved around, scratching my skin as best I could. “You and Cate getting along all right? You’ve been alone a long time. Must be kind of hard. I mean, it’s nice to have your grandmother in your life after all these years, but it can’t be easy …”
“Cate says she’s leaving.”
“Huh? I thought she was happy to find you.”
She shrugged and whipped the car into the IGA lot, pulling between a couple of pickups.
“Wants to go back to France. See if she can get my mother out of that cult thing—the reason she gave me up when I was a baby. Don’t see the point of it myself. What’s the use tryin’ to change her now? Don’t mean a thing to me.”
I ran into the store, got a frozen turkey dinner and a box of canning lids, stopped only a minute to talk to one of our fine librarians, and then back to the car. Dolly headed up Maple toward Willow Lake.
Halfway home she looked over at my grocery bag and said, “Too hot for canning. I’d wait ’til fall.”
“We’re going tomorrow. Don’t think dead fish will wait until fall.”
“You actually going to eat that stuff? Rather starve myself.”
“Well, that’s you.”
“Yeah, somebody with common sense.”
I kept quiet and let the warm air rush in and hit my face. Heat in Northern Michigan was the damp kind. Being surrounded by lakes made for hotter hots in the summer, more lake-effect snow in the winter, and great, wide skies filled with either fluffy clouds or thick, enclosing gloom all year round. I didn’t have air conditioning at my house and Sorrow, with his warm hairy body, liked to sneak into my bed at night. I’d taken to sleeping out in the living room, on my narrow couch where, as hard as he tried, Sorrow couldn’t quite fit himself next to me.
“You know, there’s this thing about the women in my family,” Dolly said as we passed Arnold’s Swamp.
I knew by her tone of voice that this was one of her bits of hard-won philosophy and she was going to spit it out no matter what.
“We don’t hang around when there’s trouble. I know that much. Like Cate taking off on me.”
“What do you mean ‘taking off on you’? She’s got something she wants to do. Not everything’s about you, Dolly.”
“Not me exactly, I guess you could say.” She thought awhile. “Nope, I got that wrong. It’s me she’s deserting all right. Like none of us hang around when somebody needs us. Like my mother dumping me the way she did when I was born.”
“Since when do you need anybody that badly?”
“Since now, I guess you could say.”
I took a deep breath and waited.
She was quiet a minute, then pulled to the side of the road, took the car out of gear, and turned to face me.
“You’ll find out soon enough, I guess.” She thought awhile. “I’m in … well … some people might call it trouble.”
“Ooh,” was all I could bring myself to say, half dreading what was coming.
“Yeah, that was what I said. Then I said a few more things.”
“What is it? If I can help …”
“Nobody can.”
“You’re not sick, are you? Nothing like that?”
She shook her head, sniffed, and looked back out the front window.
“Nothing wrong with your job. You couldn’t ever do anything that would jeopardize that. I’d never believe …”
“Hell, no. You think I’m crazy?”
“So?”
“Pregnant. That’s why Cate’s leavin’. She says she’s disgusted with me.”
‘Pregnant’ wasn’t a word I expected to fall from Deputy Dolly Wakowski’s mouth. It wasn’t just an anomaly, it was an impossibility. Square little women in blue cop suits didn’t get pregnant. And if she had—how? No guy in her life. No visits to a fertility clinic that I’d heard of. No immaculate conception—this wasn’t a saint I was looking at.
I opened my mouth and closed it a few times. I knew my eyes were wide. “Not you,” was all I could think to say.
She shook her head up and down. “Me.”
“Who’s the father?”
“Not sayin’.”
“Ever?”
“That’s right. Nobody’s business but mine.”
“Maybe the … eh … baby’s business.”
“Just mine.”
I watched her face: smug, determined, almost angry at me, as I let her news sink in. “Are you having it?”
“Sure am. Wouldn’t do that to a baby, not after all the stuff done to me.”
“Did you set out to do this, Dolly?” I asked, not knowing what else to say. “I know you’ve got this thing about family … I mean, wanting a family of your own. I thought—with your grandmother showing up the way she did—maybe you were all right.”
“I didn’t ask for it. Nothin’ I went lookin’ for. It happened, that’s all.”
I sat quietly awhile, trying to take in news I never expected to hear. When I glanced over at her, seeing only the side of her face, her mouth was set in a grim, hard line. Her small eyes stared over the wheel at the vanishing point where the road disappeared and the woods all came together. “I’ve never even seen you with a guy who wasn’t a drunk or a pervert or a suspect in something or other. This is way beyond anything I can grab hold of.”
“That’s too bad, I guess.” She took a deep breath and turned the car back on, then pulled out onto Willow Lake Road.
I couldn’t let it go. I didn’t even know what she needed from me. I wanted to be a friend but how do you do that with a person who shuts down after dropping a bomb like ‘I’m pregnant’?”
“You tell Lucky yet?”
She shook her head, glanced in her rearview mirror, and signaled her turn down my driveway.
“Doesn’t he have to know? There are questions of insurance. I mean, you’re on his payroll. Are you covered with medical insurance? What if you get hurt on the job now … ?”
“That’s all stuff I can’t think about. I’ve got to keep my mind on the baby growing in me. All the rest of it—even Lucky, well, that’s not something I’m gonna worry about right away.”
“Some of it’s got to be …”
She pulled down my drive and stopped next to the rose arbor, beside a car I didn’t want to see in my driveway. She didn’t turn off the motor, just looked over as if she couldn’t wait to get me out of there. Dolly was done with me. If I had questions, that was my problem. If I had concerns about her, that was my problem, too. Dolly had accomplished what she’d had in mind for that day. Anything more would have to wait.
I got out and stuck my head in the open window to give her a weak, half smile. “Any way I can help … ”
“Don’t worry,” she said, returning the weak smile, as if she didn’t believe it any more than I did. “It’ll all work out.”
I wanted to add something supportive, at least something kind, but I heard voices behind me, coming from out in the garden. I turned to see Harry Mockerman and Jackson Rinaldi standing together—an unlikely duo. Harry was watering my flowerbeds. My ex watched a while, then finally waved.
Dolly peeled back up my drive, shooting stones and dirt behind her. I was afraid it was her way of saying how sorry she was she’d told me about the baby. Maybe her way of telling me to keep my mouth shut. Or maybe it was just Dolly’s way of celebrating what was sure to be a major change in her life.