To Protect and Serve Read Online Free PDF Page A

money.   ‘ There was this polar bear that walked into this bar…’”
                  When they’d realized her dad needed heart surgery, she’d taken a short leave of absence from the school, and she and the girls had stayed in Redlands while her dad got back on his feet.  But now that he was feeling better, Nancy’s folk’s house had seemed to grow smaller, and she started feeling like they were in the way.  So she and the girls headed home before they overstayed their welcome.
                  Home.
                  Not anymore.  Now it just seemed like a house.  A house with too many memories.
                  Time to move on.
     
                  That was it!  They could sell the house and she and the girls could move right away.   She and Jonathon had been looking for a new house anyway, so she’d just call the realtor and have her put their house on the market sooner than planned.  Nancy felt slightly in charge of her life again.
                  As they pulled into Blake’s driveway, Christy came running out the front door yelling “catch ya later” over her shoulder.  She yanked open the door to the backseat, threw in her karate bag and jumped in behind it.
                  “Hi, Mom!”  Christy never seemed to do anything at less than full throttle.  It always made Nancy smile.  And for some weird reason, it always irritated Jonathon.  Oh, well.
                  “Hi, sweetie!  Have fun?”
                  “Yeah.  We went down to the creek and caught some frogs.”
                  “You didn’t bring any in the car, did you?”  Kate was half laughing, half serious.
                  “Nope.  We let them go after one of them peed on Blake’s hand.”
                  “Oh, gross!”  Kate was laughing hard.
                  “We’re going shopping, want to come along?”  Nancy laughed along with her two girls.  They made everything she’d been going through worth it.
                  While at the grocery store, it seemed to Nancy that the only people shopping except for her and the girls were couples.  Young couples.  Old couples.  Middle age couples.  Everyone was part of a couple except her.  It made Nancy tired just thinking about what had gone wrong with the marriage.  She was so absorbed in her own thoughts, that she missed the look that passed between Kate and Christy.  Then she had no more time
    to think when her girls started telling her about everything they’d done
    that day, in great detail and with much animation.  They brought a smile to her face.
                  Later that afternoon, while Nancy was putting groceries away in the kitchen, Jonathon walked in from the garage, wiped his feet on the small mat at the back door and started to head upstairs to his home office.
                  “Jonathon.  Do you have a minute?”  Nancy was secretly pleased with herself at just how calm she sounded.
                  “Uh, sure.” 
                  He had been treading sort of lightly around Nancy.  After getting back from her parents house, she’d made the living room couch into her bed.  She supposed she should have made him sleep on the couch, but she just didn’t want to have to put up with his complaining after his back was sure to go out if he wasn’t able to sleep on his expensive “orthopedic” bed.
                  They must have gone through six different beds in Jonathon’s search for the perfect night’s sleep.
                  She remembered how he’d insisted on using a waterbed during the time she was pregnant with Kate.  She had tried explaining to him that she wasn’t comfortable in the bed; that she just couldn’t move easily because she couldn’t get any sort of leverage to shift from one side to