Then:
“I want you to tell me exactly why she’s on the ground.”
Neither officer understood yet who had just walked through the gate.
That lasted less than a minute.
Two hours earlier, Ernestine Freeman had been furious about seventy.
Not getting older.
The party.
“I said small.”
She stood in the kitchen glaring at Denise through the sliding glass door.
Outside were twenty-seven people.
Balloons.
A barbecue grill.
Three folding tables.
String lights.
A banner reading:
HAPPY 70TH, MISS ERNESTINE
Denise grinned.
“This is small.”
“There are people here I have not seen since 1998.”
“That’s because you keep avoiding everybody.”
“I don't avoid people.”
“You turn your porch light off when you see church ladies coming.”
“That is called preserving peace.”
Denise laughed.
Ernestine tried not to.
Failed.
Her granddaughter Maya entered carrying another tray.
“Grandma, Anthony called.”
Ernestine immediately looked up.
“He coming?”
“Said he's running late.”
“Work?”
“Probably.”
Ernestine sighed.
Anthony had been “running late because of work” since he was twenty-two.
He was forty-five now.
Some things survived adulthood.
“Tell him if he misses cake, he gets none.”
Maya smiled.
“He’ll be devastated.”
“He should be.”
Ernestine tried to sound stern.
Nobody believed her.
Anthony was her youngest.
Her only son.
And the one who worried her most.
Not because he had done poorly.
The opposite.
Anthony had spent his adult life carrying responsibility as though setting it down would cause something terrible to happen.
Army.
College.
Police academy.
Patrol.
Detective bureau.
Command school.
Then administration.
More rank.
More responsibility.
Less sleep.
Ernestine was proud of him.
She also believed his job was turning his forehead permanently into a frown.
He had recently been appointed assistant chief overseeing training, policy, and professional standards for the city police department.
The newspapers had made a great deal of it.
Ernestine had cut out exactly one article.
Then told Anthony the photograph made him look tired.
“Ma, everybody said it was a good picture.”
“Everybody lied.”
That was Ernestine.
She had retired after thirty-five years as an elementary school secretary.
She had no important title.
Never wanted one.
But she had spent decades telling principals when they were wrong, children when they needed lunch, parents when they were overreacting, and teachers when they needed to calm down.
Anthony once joked that commanding several hundred police officers was easier than arguing with his mother about blood pressure medication.
He was not entirely joking.
The party began at four.
The weather was perfect.
Late-afternoon sun.
Enough breeze to keep the smoke from the grill moving.
Ernestine wore lavender because her late husband, Raymond, used to tell her purple made her look “dangerously expensive.”
Raymond had been gone eight years.
His photograph sat near the birthday gifts.
Ernestine touched the frame once when nobody was watching.
Then went back to complaining that Denise had bought too much food.
At 4:47, a car parked partly along the curb in front of the neighboring property.
It belonged to Ernestine’s nephew.
He moved it when asked.
At 5:03, somebody turned the music slightly louder for Stevie Wonder.
At 5:06, the neighbor across the back fence, Russell Pike, called 911.
He had complained about the Freeman family before.
Parking.
Music.
Children playing basketball.
A barbecue smoker once placed “too near the property line,” though it was nowhere near it.