My father followed.
The mayor shook my hand.
And somebody near the back shouted, “Congratulations, Chief!”
I smiled.
Not because I believed the hard work was over.
Because I knew it was beginning.
After the ceremony, my parents approached.
Mom reached me first.
She threw both arms around my shoulders and held me so tightly that I almost laughed.
“My baby.”
“Mom.”
“My baby is the chief of police.”
I smiled.
“I'm thirty-four.”
“And you'll be my baby when you're eighty-four.”
My father chuckled.
He was sixty-five, tall and broad-shouldered, with closely cropped gray hair and the steady eyes of a man who had spent decades repairing commercial electrical equipment.
His name was Gerald Brooks.
He'd worked as an industrial electrician for thirty-eight years before retiring.
He wasn't a wealthy man.
But he was the sort of person neighbors called when their porch lights failed or a refrigerator stopped working on a Sunday afternoon.
Sometimes he fixed the problem.
Sometimes he explained that a licensed specialist was needed.
And sometimes he simply stood beside someone who was frightened and helped them figure out what to do next.
When I was little, I believed my father could repair anything.
Then I became a police officer.
And I learned that some things were much harder to fix than a broken machine.
Dad stepped closer.
He studied my face.
Then nodded slowly.
“You look like your grandmother.”
My smile softened.
Grandma Evelyn had died five years earlier.
She was the first person in our family to tell me I should become a police officer.
Not because she loved everything police officers did.
She didn't.
She'd lived long enough to witness both extraordinary courage and terrible abuse from people wearing uniforms.
But she believed institutions changed only when good people were willing to challenge them.
I remembered sitting beside her on the porch when I was eleven.
We'd watched a police cruiser stop a young man walking home from work.
The officers questioned him for several minutes.
Then allowed him to continue.
Grandma said nothing until the cruiser disappeared.
Then she looked at me.
“Camille, you know what a badge is supposed to mean?”