My mother didn’t just answer phones. For thirty-one years, she was the night dispatcher for the whole county. Every deputy who worked after dark knew her voice before they ever saw her face. She trained Carol. She had stayed on the radio with a young Deputy Brandt for two hours the night he was shot on a farm road in 1994, keeping him talking until the ambulance found him in the dark.

When the sheriff pulled up, he walked straight past his deputy, took my mother’s arm, and helped her into the front seat of his air-conditioned cruiser. My mother thanked him and asked for a glass of water. Then he checked her paper license himself. It was a perfectly valid temporary card, the kind the courthouse issues every day. He tore the half-written ticket out of the deputy’s book and handed it to him. “Read her name off that,” he said. “Out loud.”