In invitation she opened the screen door to the kitchen. He reached over her head to hold the door for her and she stepped inside. With a click of his tongue, he told Duke to clamber up the two cement steps, then waited for the dog to hoist himself inside. He sniffed desultorily at the cabinets, then the baseboards, then slumped down on the floor under Lucas’s chair.
“Smells good,” Lucas said as he eased into one of the two chairs at the kitchen table.
“Nothing fancy,” she replied. “Pasta with homemade Bolognese sauce. I hope you like sausage.”
“I like anything I don’t have to cook,” he said.
She got a beer from the fridge and handed it to him, then poured herself a glass of wine and sipped it while water ran into the stockpot to boil.
“I didn’t think you’d want Italian again after having that big lasagna for lunch.”
Alana felt her cheeks heat beyond what could be explained by a warm stove. “I didn’t eat the lasagna,” she admitted.
“You gave it to Cody.”
She nodded. “The only people I’ve seen with cheekbones like that are the models working in the fashion industry,” she said. “I want to feed them, too.”
One corner of Lucas’s mouth lifted, but otherwise, the regular rise and fall of his chest under the blue T-shirt was his only response.
“What exactly did he do to earn a hundred hours of community service at the library?”
“Shoplifting,” Lucas said.
“What did he take?”
“Three boxes of cereal bars and a bag of M&Ms.”
Alana felt her jaw drop open. “What?”
Lucas just shrugged. “Ron Pinter wanted to press charges,” he said. “He thinks Cody had been doing it for a while and getting away with it.”
“I would think the correct response would be twenty hours of community service and perhaps some contacts with social services. Food insecurity is a very real problem—”
“Pinter talked to the judge.”
“And you didn’t make a different recommendation?”
His expression closed off even more. “Sometimes the only way people learn is to face serious consequences.”
“I get the M&Ms, but why would he steal cereal bars?”
He shifted on the chair, then took another swallow of beer. “The dad took off before I came back to Walkers Ford. He’s got three younger brothers under the age of five. They’re actually half sibs, and their father left after three kids in three years. They’ve been on and off welfare until their mother got a second-shift job at the plant. His older brother Colt is heading down the petty loser path. He’s on parole. The cereal bars are probably easy for the kids to eat while he’s at school and his mom’s asleep.”
She made a little sound to indicate she’d heard him, and continued stirring the sauce. Small bubbles were forming at the bottom of the stockpot, and Lucas was silent, still. She’d seen this in volunteers or staff at nonprofit organizations all over the world. The world’s deep needs attracted people with an incredible capacity for compassion, but if they weren’t properly nurtured and rested, they cycled from enthusiasm through anger and frustration into emptiness. Compassion fatigue was the term psychologists used. They exhausted themselves caring so much about systemic problems that were inherently difficult to solve. A sabbatical could help, but that wasn’t an option for a small-town police chief. What did Lucas do to rejuvenate?
This was basic research, figuring out what questions to ask.
And you’re curious.
“How long have you been back in Walkers Ford?”
“About three years.”
“And you were in Denver before that?”
“I grew up there. My dad moved out of Walkers Ford to go to college and never came home. Met my mom at the Rocky Mountain Music Festival and that was that. He played drums in a really bad band, and she fronted a much better one.”
Okay, she could do music. “What do you play?”
“My iPod.” He didn’t smile, but his brown eyes held a touch of humor. “I’m tone deaf.”
She laughed. “Me, too. Well, not quite tone deaf, but I can’t sing. My mother finally gave up on the piano lessons when I was fifteen.”
“You didn’t like them?”
“I wasn’t good at it, so there wasn’t any point in continuing.”
His gaze narrowed. “But did you like it?”
She shrugged. “I enjoyed it when I could play for myself. My sister’s brilliant at the piano, though. She won a national music competition when she was seventeen. A cell phone rang when she sat down to play, and rather than Chopin’s Tarantella Op. 43, she riffed from the ring tone through Chopin into Lionel Hampton’s Flying Home. She got a standing ovation from the judges.”
“Older or younger sister?”
The sheer novelty of meeting someone who didn’t know all about Freddie made her smile. “Two years older. Her name’s Freddie.”
“Alana and Freddie?”
“Frederica.”
He lifted his eyebrows.