A Deputy Made My 71-Year-Old Mother Stand in 91-Degree Heat for 40 Minutes Then She Asked Him to Say Her Name

“Did you print this at the library, hon?”

The deputy held my mother’s license up to the sun and laughed. She stood silently beside her Buick, handbag on her arm, while I waited in the passenger seat with lemon bars on my lap.

It was ninety-one degrees on County Road 6 in Minnesota, with cornfields on both sides and no shade.

Mom drove forty-eight in a fifty-five and used her blinker leaving an empty driveway. The road’s center stripe hadn’t been repainted since July, yet the deputy never explained why he’d stopped her.

He looked barely old enough to drive.

I later learned he was twenty-four—and had worn that badge for just eleven days.