As Sheriff Kick sped her Charger along the highway, she looked into her mirror at young Patience Goodgolly glowering in the backseat, knowing she was closer to sixteen than twenty-one, wishing she could find a way to prove, for the girl’s own good, that she was a minor. She is not a tree, Dr. Patel had said. As soon as Denise came on duty, she had checked birth records in Bad Axe and surrounding counties. Nothing, not a surprise. So Patience Goodgolly was as old as she claimed to be, and per the district attorney, who wasn’t ready to charge her with a crime, she was going home.

The anxious girl twisted on the backseat to see Deputy Luck trailing in her Tahoe. She was going home, but the sheriff didn’t plan to leave her there alone.

She has given birth before… possibly more than once.

The sheriff opened her partition window.

“So, are you pregnant again?”

Patience Goodgolly’s head whipped around so hard her bonnet strings slapped her face.

Now I know she understands me. Armed with this information, Sheriff Kick turned off the highway onto Liberty Hill Road. She slowed to twenty miles an hour to navigate the rutted gravel. Deputy Luck followed into the Charger’s dust cloud. The girl clenched her jaw and stared sullenly into the mirror. The sheriff leaned, opened her glove box, removed the plastic Walgreens bag, and hung it in the window space.

“The doctor said you have been before, and you might be again. So there’s something in this sack that might interest you. It’s a way of telling whether you’re going to have a baby or not.”

She let that settle in, decelerating to roll so slowly that red-winged blackbirds on their second or third broods rose from cattails in the boggy ditch to screech and flutter at the windshield. Farther on the Charger passed a new weed that the sheriff didn’t recognize, tall and fibrous, with an ugly brownish platform for a blossom, invading the asters and the joe-pye.

“It’s a pregnancy test, and you could have it,” she told Patience Goodgolly, “if you wanted it.”

She dialed the Charger’s nose into the Goodgolly driveway. They rolled under a canopy of shade until they reached the swing gate. The sheriff turned her engine off and took her keys. She lugged the heavy gate to the edge of the driveway, where it stopped against a cairn of sandstone slabs. She made eye contact with Deputy Luck: Close it after you. When she sat behind the wheel again and looked into her mirror, Patience Goodgolly held the test kit in her lap.

Soon the Charger came to a stop in the desolate Goodgolly farmyard. The sheriff cleared her door locks.

“Would you like me to read the instructions to you?”