“I’m thinking LAPD. When I’m old enough.”

“They need good people.”

“The pedal sucks, Mom,” Bradley says to me. “Can I just go boarding?”

“Sure,” I say. “Thanks for looking at it. You put the new wheels and tires on the Cyclone?”

“Before you even got out of bed.”

“How do they look?”

“The shoes are too small but the meats are sick.”

“Awesome. Thanks, son.”

“Sheriff ’s pay good?” Bradley asks Hood.

“Fair.”

“Good as the cops?”

“About the same,” says Hood. “But we get better cars and a little more open road to drive them on.”

“I’m good with large-caliber handguns.”

Hood raises his eyebrows.

“Nice IROC,” says my son.

“Thanks. I bored and stroked it, goosed out another thirty horse.”

“Glasspaks?”

“Yeah, first thing I added.”

“I could tell by the sound.”

Bradley hesitates then leaves, letting the screen door slam behind him. A front of hot air floats in from outside. In the sudden silence Hood closes his notepad. I see him looking past me now into the living room, a mess of a place, kind of a Polynesian party room in honor of Ernest. It’s got a very nice tiki bar.

“You’re climbing the ladder pretty quickly,” I tell Hood. “Last night you were a patrolman and now you’re a detective.”

“They moved me up for the Auto Body thing. This week I’m both.”

“Bet they won’t pay you twice.”

Hood smiles and shakes his head.

For about two seconds I wonder if I should say what I want to say. If it takes longer than two seconds to give yourself permission to speak, then your rule book is getting overlong. I hate rules.

“I like the way you look, C. Hood. I like your voice and your attitude. I teach eighth-grade history but I’m nothing like the eighth-grade teachers you had. So I think you ought to hit the road, keep yourself out of trouble. That’s the last time I’ll make the slightest effort to protect you.”

“I’ll do that.”

“You’ll do what?”

“Hit the road.”

“I caught you checking out my legs and just about everything else.”

He looks away.

“I run eight miles a week and do hapkido.”

“It shows. I apologize, Ms. Jones. My first day as a detective I was hoping not to make a complete ass of myself.”

I have to smile at C. Hood. “Be honest with me right now, Charles Robert-that uniform shirt you wore last night, did you have it tailored?”

He nods and his ears actually turn red. I want to lock the doors and jump him but I won’t do it here. My social guidelines are somewhat relaxed but I’d never drag Ernest’s pride through the dirt like that for no good reason. Then Ernest would break Hood in half and that would become another problem I don’t want to have.

“I’d like the name and a telephone number or address for the relative you were visiting last night,” says Hood.

“Nice try at reestablishing your law enforcement control. But it’s none of your business who I was visiting.”

I watch him weigh the options, which are two: arrest me or back down. It’s a mismatch.

I get up and walk over to him and lean in. I touch my nose to the bottom of his trimmed sideburn, about halfway down his ear. And breathe in.

Supermarket soap, drugstore shave cream and Charlie Hood.

Then I turn and walk back into the house, waving good-bye over my shoulder.

Hood sat in the activities room with his mother and father. He was still rattled by Suzanne Jones and he couldn’t put her out of his mind. He kept seeing her nightshirt against her back as she walked away, the soft material creasing left then right with each step. She made him feel skinned. Now he was back in uniform and on his way to swing-shift patrol that evening and he figured maybe patrol was where he belonged.

His father, Douglas, introduced Hood to his latest girlfriend, whom Douglas believed to be Hood’s mother, Iris, his wife of forty-eight years. Iris herself sat beside Hood, and together they faced Douglas and his “wife” as they held hands. Douglas was young to be in such an advanced state of dementia, and it had come over him with surprising speed after he retired from the city of Bakersfield. He’d been a landscape supervisor. Hood wondered if the herbicides and insecticides and fertilizers had contributed. The doctors talked on and on about genetic predisposition, sedentary retirement and myeloid plaque. Douglas was seventy-five years old and no longer recognized his wife. He had hit her. Now he fussed over the potted plants and the frail indoor ficus trees of the assisted-living center, and held hands with the girlfriend. Charlie could watch himself ebb and flow on his father’s memory like a small ship on a fast tide. Iris had tried to detach herself from her husband except to appear for these weekly visits.

“Go with threaded pipe, never cement,” he said to Charlie. “Make sure you’ve got enough silicon tape to do the job right. Never put the cement on threaded pipe. I had a guy with the city doing that out at the park and I fired him. Probably should have killed him while I was at it.”

“Seen any good shows, Dad?”

“Same old.”

“They’ve got Bewitched on tape,” said the girlfriend. Charlie and Iris had gathered that her name was Brenda.

“Fanfuckingtastic,” muttered Iris.

“We always had plenty of shovels around,” said Douglas.

Later Hood took his mother out for an early dinner, and she caught him up with his brothers and sisters, two each, all older than him by quite a bit. His memories of childhood in Bakersfield were usually of him looking up at his towering siblings or later watching them drive away in cars. He learned early to hate good-byes. He developed into a decent student, a good friend, a fair tennis player. The girls usually skipped over him in favor of the louder and more clever boys. His ears were slightly large and blushed before the rest of his face did. He dated during his years at JC and Cal State Northridge but found it disappointing and expensive. He got B’s and a political science degree. The Sheriff’s Department had given him a start on life, then the first Iraq tour that led him to the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, then the second tour. By the time he came home from Anbar in ’05 he was twenty-five and he wanted to get his deputy’s job back, find a good woman and maybe have a little fun.

Hood followed his mother’s gaze out the window to the planter flowers wilting in the San Bernardino heat. The bank thermometer across the street said “102 degrees… 4:35 P.M… TWELVE MONTH CDs TO 4.25%…”

When she looked back at Hood, there were tears in her eyes though her expression was steady and unpitying.

“Mom.”

“It’s okay. I’m okay, Charlie.”

“There’s going to be more.”

“More what?”

“Good things.”

“The kind you have to be dead to get?”

“Not those kind.”

“Tell me when you spot one coming.”

“You did all you could.”

“I loved him.”

Hood reached out and took her hand. Her skin was cool and soft, and he could feel the hardness of the bones beneath it. The waitress brought their dinners then came back and topped off their iced tea.

“A soldier called,” she said. “Lenny Overbrook. He said he knew you over there and wanted your number. I said no and he gave me his.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s perfectly okay.”

She dug into her purse and finally handed Hood a torn-off corner of notebook paper with a number on it.

“I’ll handle it, Mom. Thanks.”

“He sounds polite. He said you understood him.”

“Lenny was always polite.”

Hood cruised Miracle Auto Body at eleven. He saw that the Escalade was in the lot but the other cars were gone. A new Suburban with dealer plates was parked beside the Cadillac. The lights were on both outside the shop and inside, and Hood could see three young men standing on the catwalk smoking.