You might think the holiday would make for a quiet night on patrol, but you’d be wrong. Christmas does weird things to people. My first call was to deal with Darius Stedman, who was moonwalking to Michael Jackson on the boom box, in the parking lot of the 126 Bar. Mr. Stedman was wearing a Santa hat and only a Santa hat. The temperature was seven degrees outside, and body parts freeze pretty quickly in that kind of weather. So I turned on the siren and went screaming toward the 126 to make sure that Mr. Stedman’s various appendages didn’t start snapping off.

It’s not like he was a regular in the county drunk tank. We had plenty of those. No, he was forty-three years old, a solid citizen, and my former high school science teacher. I liked him. However, he’d lost his wife to a heart condition over the summer, and the holidays have a way of bringing those things roaring back, particularly when alcohol is involved. When I got to the 126, a crowd of bar-goers was cheering as Mr. Stedman danced to “Billie Jean.” Ricky, my husband of four years, was among them, but we ignored each other like strangers. I broke up the party, wrapped Mr. Stedman in a blanket, and took him back to his house to thaw him out and sober him up. He spent the next half hour sobbing to me about his wife over coffee.

It made me think how nice it must be to love someone so deeply that it hurts that much to lose them. I’d never experienced an emotion like that, and I wouldn’t until the following year.

Until you, sweetheart.

I left when Mr. Stedman finally fell asleep on his sofa. I had to drive by the 126 on my way back to the station, so I decided to stop to talk to Ricky. I was sure he was still at the bar. He was always there, drinking up my county salary and flirting with the eighteen-year-old waitresses. The 126 was our local dirty dive. It took its name from its location on Highway 126 about ten miles outside the county seat, a town called Random. During the summers, they had strip nights and wet T-shirt contests. Dart games turned into knife fights. Cocaine was snorted in the bathroom. And yet almost everyone in the county, from parents to preachers, came in for pizza and drinks at the 126 several times a week, because there was nowhere else to go.