Storm Front

years in at the community college, before she got knocked up again and had to get a job.
    She got a spot in the same plant where her mother worked. When her mother began suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome—meat-cutting did that to you—Florence, who was already called “Ma” by her friends, decided to take the latest offer of marriage, to a man called Rick Nobles. She knew going in that the marriage wouldn’t last, but it would carry her through to another job.
    Nobles had his own towing company, which actually picked up with Ma doing the books and calling around for business, but he couldn’t keep his hands off the customers. When he got one of them pregnant, three months before Ma would produce yet another son, she called it off.
    Nobles was decent about it, and Ma got out with a three-year-old Ford F-150 and fifteen thousand in cash. From there, it was a series of office jobs, and a second marriage to a man who had a small farm, a part-time salvage business, and a big hunger for Wendy’s Baconators. One Baconator too many, a failed Heimlich maneuver, and Ma was on her own again.
    She’d felt bad when he died—cried off and on for a month—but then had gotten on with it.
    —
    W HEN M A realized the minister that Case and Flowers were talking about was her very own Reverend Jones of the big beard, big teeth, and wide red suspenders, she nearly spoke up in praise of the man. But some instinct made her keep her mouth shut—possibly because of the money they were also talking about.
    She couldn’t help wondering if Jones might need . . . an assistant?
    There was no way she could contact him to ask that question, until she heard about the shoot-out at the hunting camp—and that Jones was on the surgical floor at the hospital in Mankato.
    She was familiar with the surgical floor.
    Two of her sons had been there: Mateo, after jumping out of a hayloft with a bedsheet for a parachute, which had resulted in two badly broken legs; and young Sam, who’d gotten pissed off when Ma handed him a spading fork and told him to get busy in the garden, digging potatoes, and he’d hurled the fork down in disgust. Unfortunately for Sam, before the fork got to the ground, two tines had gone through the tops of his Nikes, through his feet, and most of the way through the soles of his shoes. He’d been standing outside the chicken house when he did it, and some chicken shit had penetrated the wound. They had taken him to the hospital for the necessary repairs, which had been complicated.
    Jones’s arrest had been all over the news, along with the fact that he was listed in good condition. Ma figured that she at least owed him a visit.
    When her boys had been hurt, she hadn’t had a lot of money—she still didn’t, though things had gotten considerably better since the family got back in the salvage business. Anyway, when the boys had gotten hurt, a woman from the cashier’s office had pursued her through the halls of the hospital like a hound from hell. Ma had eventually worked out a way she could visit them without bothering with the front entrance.
    Her latest trip to the hospital began with a phone call:
    “This is Mable Diarylide with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I am calling for Agent Flowers. We have a crime-scene crew that needs to speak with Reverend Elijah Jones. We need the room number.”
    That got her the room number.
    —
    W HEN HER KIDS had been hospitalized, the visiting hours had gone until 8:30 p.m. She’d usually gone in late, to avoid the harridan from the cashier’s office, and because the kids had been young, she had been allowed to stay later than was normally permitted.
    Good training.
    She went in that night through the emergency room, her hair covered with a babushka. She took a circuitous route to a back stairway and went up one flight. The nursing station was down to her right, so she could push the door open just a crack and see if anyone was there. For the first few minutes, there was. The last time, she pushed open the door just in time to see the nurse pick up a clipboard and exit, stage right.
    Ma was across the hall in five seconds, and into Jones’s room. Jones was asleep, but not very.
    She touched his arm, and he opened his eyes: “What?”
    “Do you remember me?” she whispered. “I’m Florence McClane.”
    He looked at her for a long time, in the dim light, and then shook his head. “No.”
    She told him about being a little girl in Bizby, and even then, he