The moment her name went out over the airwaves, the current dispatcher, Kim—whom my mother had patiently trained through ninety terrifying night shifts without ever taking the headset away from her—broke protocol to ask if Shirley was the person stopped on the road. Immediately after, an orderly wave of voices from across the entire county began checking in one by one, following the exact radio discipline my mother had taught them over three decades. Veteran Deputy Dennis, Odell Fire One, hospital medics, a state trooper she had guided through a heavy fog back in 2008, a snowplow driver named Gary whom she had checked on every fifteen minutes during winter blizzards, and a young deputy whose wife she had comforted on the phone all called in to greet her with deep respect. Then Sheriff Tom Hanley came over the channel, demanding to know how long she had been standing on the gravel, ordering Deputy Brandt to put her inside her air-conditioned car immediately, and apologizing to my mother over the open radio. Seconds later, a volunteer firefighter named Walt Brandt called in on Fire Twelve, realizing in horror that the rookie officer at the scene was his own son, Kyle, and he told the boy over the air about a dark night in October 2009. When Kyle was just seven years old, a tractor had rolled over and pinned Walt’s hips in an unmarked field, and my mother had triangulated his location using the grain elevator light and the church steeple while keeping Walt conscious for fifty-one minutes by making him talk continuously about his young son.
Hearing his father’s words, Deputy Kyle Brandt lost the strength in his legs and collapsed onto the back bumper of the Buick with his hands pressed over his eyes, just as Sheriff Hanley, Walt, and over a dozen other emergency responders arrived on the shoulder. When the furious sheriff confiscated Kyle’s ticket book and unit keys to fire him after just eleven days on the job, my mother stepped out into the sun and asked instead for one month of the young man’s nights. She insisted that he sit in the second chair beside Kim from eleven to seven wearing her old, electrical-tape-wrapped headset without speaking, explaining that he needed to hear what human beings actually sound like when they call for help before judging them on the roadside. Sheriff Hanley agreed, sharing aloud how my mother had calmly talked him through delivering his own daughter, Amy, on the kitchen floor with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck during a blinding March blizzard in 1998. After Kyle completed his thirty nights listening to frantic calls in the basement, he visited my mother’s porch in September as a changed, compassionate officer, and she told him to keep her old headset inside his squad car’s glove box. Sitting with her afterward as the autumn corn turned gold, I finally apologized for telling people she just answered phones and learned she had listened to the police scanner every Friday night to make sure I was safe at my football games, and now I call her every Sunday at nine knowing she will always pick up on the first ring.