“Who would’ve thought an eighteen-year-old Amish girl could leave the only place she’s ever known and not only make a new start in the big bad city, but become a cop?” She gives me that trademark smile again. The crooked one that’s impish and bold.
“Not me,” I tell her.
“Do you remember the day we met?”
“I remember that diner.”
“Nasty.”
“Food was good.”
“If you like fries with your grease.”
We stare at each other and for an instant we’re those girls again. Gina was confident, brash, and utterly certain that she was going to take the world by storm. All she needed was her big break and by God she was going to make it happen, if only by the sheer force of her will. I was lost, light-years out of my element, missing the only life I’d ever known—my parents, my siblings, my Amish identity—and I was equally certain that same world was going to tear me apart piece by piece.
“That dress you were wearing,” she murmurs. “I figured you were in some kind of weird sex cult or something.”
“Your waitress uniform wasn’t much better.”
“God, I hated those uniforms. Pink polyester with all the trimmings.”
I’d left Painters Mill just a few days before meeting her. I was living in my junker of a car and I was down to my last forty dollars. I had no idea where my next meal would come from. I didn’t have a place to sleep. Gina was working as a server at a diner near downtown. I stopped in late one evening for food and maybe some confirmation that I wasn’t the last person left on earth. She waited on me. Gave me free coffee. A day-old piece of cherry pie. She made me laugh. At the end of her shift, she sat in the booth with me and we ended up drinking a pot of coffee and talking for three hours.
She was a woman with a plan and the kinds of dreams I’d never conceived. The young Kate Burkholder I’d been was captivated. I saw her brashness as confidence. Her certainty as determination. I was astounded by all the things she was going to do with her life, and I had absolutely no doubt she would succeed, no matter what stood in her way.
At some point she recognized my predicament. I was hoarding the last of my cash. When she realized I didn’t have anywhere to go, she invited me to spend the night at her little one-bedroom apartment “as long as you aren’t an ax murderer and promise not to steal me blind.” I was horrified that she could envision such things. My shock only made her laugh. When I told her I needed a job, she talked to her manager and somehow managed to convince him I would be a perfect addition to his waitstaff even though I had zilch in terms of experience. Gina was persuasive, and when we walked out of the diner at midnight, I had a matching ugly uniform of my own and my first-ever English friend. More importantly, for the first time in four years I thought I just might have a chance for a future that didn’t include the expectation of marriage and children before I was ready, or submitting to rules I didn’t always agree with.
One night at her apartment turned into two, and in the following weeks, I took a crash course into how not to be Amish, courtesy of Gina Colorosa. When she found out I’d only gone to school through the eighth grade, she got me signed up to earn my GED. I continued working at the diner. She landed a job answering phones at a police substation in a bad neighborhood a few blocks from the apartment. The stories she told when she came home were the most exciting I’d ever heard. We’d sit on the living room floor, watching TV, smoking cigarettes, and drinking Heineken. During those late-night sessions, I realized there was a great big world out there and I desperately wanted to be part of it.
“I’m going to be a cop,” she’d proclaimed.
The thought made me laugh, something I did a lot of since meeting her. It sounded as far-fetched as taking a spaceship to another planet. She was too young—a woman—and a rule breaker who didn’t have much respect for any kind of authority. But Gina had a knack for making the impossible sound like a cakewalk, and with great flourish she pulled out the brochure from the local community college. “All we have to do is get our criminal justice degrees. We’re so poor, we won’t even have to pay tuition. Look here, Kate, they have night classes. Weekends, too. Obviously, we’ll have to keep working.” She grinned. “The only problem is that to make time for all this, we’ll have to cut back on our drinking.”
It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. We’d laughed until we cried, and in the weeks that followed, that college brochure became so wrinkled and creased that by the time we were enrolled, the print was illegible.
Now, a lifetime of experience later, sipping coffee and listening to the storm rage outside, we look at each other and all of those memories boil in the backs of our brains.
After a moment, she laughs. “Do you remember the time I got pulled over in your Mustang for not dimming my bright headlights when I passed that frickin’ cop?” she asks.
“You were a terrible driver and the recipient of more than one ticket.”
“Which I couldn’t afford.” She chuckles. “There I was, in the pouring rain, down on my knees, in the dark looking for that stupid dimmer switch on the floorboard, telling him ‘I know it’s here somewhere.’”
I grin. “The dimmer switch was on the turn signal.”
“That cop thought I was an idiot.”
“You were.”
She grins and the simple artlessness of it goes deep into me, stirring that small place where trust is absolute, every word is believed, and your friends never break your heart.
“So what happened?” I ask. “After I left Columbus?”
“I was a good cop for a while. Not perfect. I gained some experience. Paid a few dues.” She lifts her uninjured shoulder and lets it drop. “Not everyone in the department was as idealistic as you,” she says. “The years, the things you experience, change you. I guess I got cynical. Fell in with the wrong kind of cops.”
The truth is that I’d seen that part of her even before I left. Gina had started down a road I didn’t want to travel. She was drinking too much. Going to cop bars every night after work. I’d started to hear stories about her sleeping around. About the rules being bent. Procedure not being followed and later lied about. There were whispered stories about our counterparts and some of them had begun to include her name.
“How long has the vice unit been on the take?” I ask, hating the words, the dirty feel of them as they come out of my mouth.
Gina takes the question in stride. “Too long. Years.”
“That’s a pretty damning answer,” I say.
“It started out the way bad things usually do. Small scale. You know, innocent things like concert tickets in exchange for not writing a speeding ticket. It didn’t stay small scale. The unit would do a raid and bust some scumbag. Said scumbag had a ton of cash laid out on a table. A kilo of cocaine. Cash never made it to evidence. I rationalized that he hadn’t exactly earned the money. He wasn’t going to be needing it where he was going, right?” Her gaze sweeps to mine. In the depths of her eyes I see shame. Regret. Most of all, I see what I can only describe as … grief.
“I thought: Why not me?” she whispers. “Why should some dregs of the earth get all that cash and not me?”