The fourth row, third card from the left, said JODY A. SIZEMORE, 23, 12/29/2020.
He did not look at it this morning. He had gotten good at not looking at that one card while looking at the board. It was a skill, like keeping your eyes on the road while a deer stood in the ditch.
The morning went the way mornings went. There was a meeting with two of the county commissioners at nine about the jail budget, which was over, and the cost of Narcan, and the new state requirement that every jail provide medication for opioid use disorder to anybody who came in already on it, which the commissioners understood to be a good idea in principle and a catastrophe in practice. Commissioner Lovell, who owned the Ford Café, said that in his day you went to jail and got sober in jail and that was the end of it, and Nolan said that in his day you also came out and went to the cemetery a week later because your tolerance was gone, and he had six cards on his wall to prove it. They voted it through.
At ten-forty-five young Deputy Ricketts, five months on the job, was in his door with a question about serving civil process on a man who had moved to Florida. At eleven Nolan signed eighteen things the chief deputy put in front of him without reading half of them, which was a thing he had sworn in 2010 he would never do.
At eleven-twenty, he looked at the back of his hand and saw AMLO, and got up, and got his hat.
"Going to get my pills," he told Doreen, on the way past the window. "Then I'll be at the Café if anybody needs me. Radio's on."
"Get the pie," Doreen said. "It's coconut today."
"I'm a man with high blood pressure, Doreen."
"Get it anyway."
He walked. It was a block and a half around the courthouse square, and the day had come up blue and cool with a little wind out of the northwest that turned the maple leaves on the courthouse lawn over and showed their pale undersides. He walked the way he had learned to walk in this town over thirty-one years, which was slowly, nodding, with a word for everybody. Hey there, Lester. How's that knee? Morning, Mrs. Gaither. Tell that boy of yours I said to slow down out on the Pekin road or I'll slow him down myself. A man he had arrested twice crossed the street to tell him he'd been clean nine months and had a job at the sawmill in Salem, and Nolan shook his hand a long time and said he was proud of him and meant it.