Tony laughed, but his eyes looked serious when he said, “I don’t like it when she upsets you.”
Stunned, Beth was conscious of warmth spreading from her chest outward until even her fingers and toes tingled. It was like nothing else she’d ever felt.
Because no one has ever worried first about me, she realized. Or…worried about me at all. No, she came to everyone else’s rescue. Wasn’t that her entire purpose in life? Well, friends cared, but that was different. They didn’t focus on her the way he was doing now.
“What are you thinking?” Tony had paused in the act of sprinkling parmesan on his pasta.
“I…” She shook her head, then smiled tremulously. “Thank you.”
He watched her for a moment, as if unconvinced, but finally nodded.
They ate for a couple minutes without either speaking. Beth finally said, “Will you tell me why you went into law enforcement?”
He smiled. “You mean, what tragedy pointed me that way? Wasn’t one.”
“Something must have.”
“Actually, I went pretty wild when I was sixteen, seventeen. I was the oldest, and my parents expected a lot of me. It wasn’t only that I wanted to party like my friends did, instead of babysitting my little sisters and brother. It was the lectures about how I was their role model. I felt pressure to be perfect. So, being a typical American teenager…”
“You rebelled.” Beth found herself smiling. “I’m having trouble picturing you drunk and disorderly, but okay.”
“I turned into a shit. Got arrested a couple of times. I was with some buddies when they stole a car.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s when I got lucky. The cop who stopped us singled me out. He volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club. In my rebel mind, not a cool place—” Tony’s amusement showed “—but he talked me into playing some pickup basketball games there, hanging out with him. I wasn’t his only project, but I felt like I mattered to him. He told stories about being cop, and I soaked it all up. My parents were grateful but uneasy, too.”
“Was he Latino?”
“No, and that was part of it, I’m sure. Mostly, Mom and Dad and a lot of other people they knew had butted heads with the police. There was a good-size population of illegal immigrants around, and they were scared to death of cops. So they were both dismayed and proud of me for graduating with a degree in criminology and then from the police academy. My father asked if I’d pull some brown-skinned farm worker over just because he had a taillight out, and I said yes, but that I’d only warn him to get it fixed, not insist on seeing his birth certificate.”
“Has it been an issue? I mean, are you expected to look for immigration violations?”
He shook his head. “Not so far. In fact, we try to stay hands-off. It’s more important to us that people who witnessed a crime be willing to talk to us than be afraid we’ll get them deported.”
“That makes sense.” She’d had that impression. “Your police friend. Is he still around?”
“Retired, but yeah. I’ll take you to meet him someday.” He resumed eating, not seeming aware of the implications of that promise.
Her sense of warmth and hope deepened. “Does he have a family?”
Tony shook his head. “He and his wife hadn’t had kids, and she’d died of cancer a few years before I met him. That’s probably why he started volunteering the amount of time he did.”
“You were lucky that he believed in you.”
His eyebrows rose. “You mean, that he bullied me into taking a hard look at my options?”
Beth laughed. “Either/or.”
“I don’t know what would have happened to me if he hadn’t come along. I don’t like imagining.”
“You don’t really think…”
“If I’d been arrested for stealing a car when I was seventeen, I could have been tried as an adult. Or sent to juvenile detention until I aged out. Would I have emerged a reformed, optimistic young man? I really doubt it. No, he caught me just in time.”
That…sobered her. Trying to see a hard-bitten ex-con instead of the Detective Navarro she knew was a challenge, but he was right. Not much separated tough young men or women who took one path from those who took another.