“It’s Tuesday,” she announced, setting the pot down on the table and pulling a pencil from her towering beehive hairdo and a tablet of tickets from the pocket of her uniform. “The lunch special today is two tacos with a side of beans. That, or meat loaf and gravy.”

Joanna and Marianne both ordered tacos.

“You go first,” Marianne said, once Daisy had taken the pot and their order and headed back to the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

“If the board of supervisors wanted me to do a seven and-a-half percent across-the-board budget cut,” Joanna groused, “why didn’t they tell me that before I took delivery on all those new Crown Victorias? They were all contracted for last year by Walter McFadden’s administration. It seems to me it would have been easier to renege on the purchase of several vehicles than it’s going to be to cut head count in either patrol or jail personnel. I’ve got a fifteen percent increase in caseload and an eighteen-percent increase in jail population, but I’m supposed to handle all of it with seven and a half percent less money than we originally budgeted. And that, I might add, was far less than the department should have had to begin with.”

Marianne smiled at Joanna over the top of her coffee cup. “Sounds like loaves and fishes time. You’ll just have to take what you have and make it stretch.”

“Right,” Joanna said. “But how? They won’t let me move any of the money from one category to another. According to Melanie Hastings, the funds used to pay for the cars came out of the capital-improvement budget. That money had to he spent for the vehicles or we would have lost it entirely. According to her, those figures were frozen. So here I sit with ten brand new cars in a department where I’m expected to gel by with two fewer deputies to drive them. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Since when do bureaucracies have to make sense, Joanna?” Marianne asked.

Joanna sat back in the booth. “All right now,” she said. “Your turn.”

Marianne shrugged. “Same song, second verse. Bureaucracies are the same all over.”

“The adoption people?” Joanna asked.

Marianne nodded. “That’s right,” she said.

Jeff Daniels, Marianne’s career homemaker husband, had left for China the day after Christmas on what was supposed to be a two-week expedition to bring home an orphaned baby girl. Those two weeks had stretched into three and now al-most four, with no end in sight.

“What do you hear from Jeff?” Joanna asked.

“Not much,” Marianne replied. “I talked to him last night. He said there’s lots of coal dust in the air. I’m worried sick.”

Joanna frowned. “How come? Is Jeff allergic to it or some-thing?”

“It’s code,” Marianne explained. “We talked to some of the other parents who’ve gone through this same agency. They warned us that the Chinese authorities sometimes monitor phone calls, so before we left, Jeff and I established a code. The orphanage is located in Chengdu. People there mostly burn coal for heat, so in the winter especially the whole city is hazy with smoke and soot. The coal dust gets into everything.

“Since visiting Americans always complain about the coal dust, Jeff’s talking about it on the phone shouldn’t worry the authorities, but it does me. It means trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know, but he did tell me that he’s got to have more money. I spent the rest of the night worrying about where I’m going to get it.”

“How much more money does he think he’ll need?” Joanna asked.

Marianne sighed. “Five thousand dollars.”

Joanna whistled. “That sounds like a lot.”

“It is,” Marianne told her. “It’s exactly double what we’d been told to expect. What I’m afraid is that the authorities have changed their minds. Maybe the baby is sick and they don’t want to release her. From what Jeff said, it sounds as though, if we don’t come up with the extra money, they won’t let us have her.”

“What are you going to do?” Joanna asked.

“There’s a special board of directors meeting going on up at the church right now. I’ve asked them to advance me the money. Jeff told me last night that he needs it right away. Today, if possible. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Jeff and Marianne, almost thirty and childless not by choice, had been on several potential adoption lists for years. Andy Brady’s sudden death the previous fall had infused a whole new urgency into the process. When the possibility of adopting a little girl from China had presented itself, they had jumped at the chance.

Having both of them fly across the Pacific to pick up the baby had turned out to be prohibitively expensive, so they had opted for Jeff to go on his own. That somewhat unorthodox behavior-the idea of having an adoptive father show tip to collect the baby rather than an adoptive mother-had proved to be a real stumbling block. What had seemed like a perfectly sensible idea to Jeff and Marianne-having the primary caregiver pick up the baby-seemed somehow suspect in the eyes of officials in the Chinese orphanage. For weeks now, they had been throwing up one obstacle after another.

“Do you think it would help if you were there?” Joanna asked.

Marianne shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “Besides, having me there would make it far more expensive. It would only complicate things that much more. We’d be having to worry about my schedule and about finding someone to substitute for me while I was gone. At least this way, Jeff’s time is totally his own.”

With a disconsolate Marianne staring into her almost empty coffee cup, Joanna tried to offer some words of encouragement.

“Come on,” she said. “Jeff Daniels may seem like the most mild-mannered guy on earth, but that’s only on the surface. Once he gets his back up, you know as well as I do that he’ll shrivel up into a little old man before he’ll come back home empty-handed.”

Acknowledging Joanna’s support with a wan smile, Marianne changed the subject. “Speaking of world travelers,” she said, “what do you hear from your mother?”

Joanna glanced at her watch. “Her plane’s due into Tucson International around four. She was bound and determined to be back in time for the women’s club luncheon tomorrow. That’s when the Historical Committee presents the framed picture of me to hang in the lobby out at the department.”

Marianne smiled. “I know,” she said. “I’m on the committee.”

Joanna continued. “Since today is a workday, I told Eleanor I wouldn’t he able to come hick her up. Jim Bob and Eva Lou offered to go get her, but Mother insisted on having her friend, Margaret Turnbull, meet her instead. They’ll have an early dinner in Tucson and then be home around nine or so.”

“Has she had fun?” Marianne asked.

Joanna nodded. “It sounds like it. Marcie and Bob must have seen to it that they’ve hit every tourist attraction and museum for miles around. I’m sure my mother has been in seventh heaven.”

The previous Thanksgiving, Joanna’s long-lost brother had resurfaced. As a baby, he had been given up for adoption prior to Joanna’s parents’ wedding. Joanna had grown up without ever knowing that her mother and father, Eleanor and Big Hank Lathrop, had an out-of-wedlock child that Eleanor’s parents had insisted they not keep. After the death of both his adoptive parents, forty-four-year-old Bob Brundage had come searching for his biological mother. Eleanor Lathrop had welcomed him with open arms. The feeling was evidently mutual. For Christmas, Bob and his wife, Marcie, had invited Eleanor to come visit them in Washington, D.C., for two weeks.

“She’s never had a chance to do anything like that before, has she?” Marianne asked.

“Never,” Joanna said. “She was widowed young and had a snotty teenager to deal with, sort of like yours truly and a certain hot-tempered nine-year-old.”

“Well then,” Marianne said, “I’d say she’s earned the right to have some fun.”