Oh, little black bird on my wire line
Dark as trouble in this heart of mine
Poor little black bird sings a worried song
Dark as trouble, till winter's come and gone

Winter's Come and Gone - Gillian Welch

Amelia was in the kitchen with both of her girls. Ashley sitting on a stool at the island and Kimberly strapped to Amelia's chest in some sort of baby sling, asleep. Brenda felt unusually shy at the sight of the domestic scene and hesitated in the doorway for a moment.

"Good morning Mary Sunshine," Amelia said when she finally caught sight of Brenda lurking. "How do you feel?"

"Good," Brenda said. "Sorry I slept so much, I guess I was tired."

"Well, we all feel like s-h-i-t," Amelia said. "You want some coffee?"

"What did she spell?" Ashley demanded. "Something bad?"

"I dunno," Brenda shrugged. "I'm an awful speller."

Ashley scowled and then said, "Can you make my hair be braided like yours?"

She glanced at Amelia who set a mug of black coffee down in front Brenda on the counter. Amelia nodded.

"I'd love to," Brenda said. "I need two hair ties and a hairbrush."

"Okay!" Ashley said, hopping down off her stool and running out of the kitchen toward the stairs.

"Where's Al?" Brenda asked and then, trying to sound nonchalant, added, "And Sharon?"

"Alan is picking up his parents from the train station," Amelia said. "They should be back in half an hour or so. Your beautiful Miss Sharon is out in the backyard picking herbs from the garden for the stuffing."

"You have an herb garden?" Brenda asked. "Gross."

"It's not gross," Amelia said. "It's nice to have fresh stuff."

"It's November, how is it even growin'?"

"It's in the little greenhouse Al made me," she said. "Don't look at me like that, Brenda Leigh, I went to law school exactly so I didn't have to live in squalor well into my thirties."

"Tell Ashley I've gone to the greenhouse and will return shortly," Brenda said, adopting a snooty sounding accent.

"You're a bitch," Amelia called after her.

Possibly, she should have worn shoes. It wasn't cold, exactly, but the grass was dewy and the slate path cold when she walked across it, navigating herself toward the little structure near the back fence. She could just make out Sharon's silhouette through the muddled glass.

She pulled the little door open and it didn't go quietly - the bottom scraped along the concrete slab the structure sat on.

"Good morning," she said.

"Brenda," Sharon said. "Good morning. Come smell this basil. It's huge, it's growing like crazy."

Brenda walked over, peered down at what looked to her like a bunch of green weeds. She couldn't tell one thing from another, though it all smelled good. Sharon already had a plastic bowl full of cuttings, but she broke of a big, green leaf and held it under Brenda's nose.

"Smells like pesto," Brenda said and Sharon laughed.

"Imagine that," she said.

"So," Brenda said, reaching up for the end of one of her braids and giving a little tug. "Did you sleep okay?"

Sharon tilted her head, considering. "Yes, though not enough, I think. I got up at six to put the turkey in the oven and then, well, you know how it goes in the kitchen."

She didn't, but didn't bother to say so.

"You should've woken me up, I woulda come down with ya," Brenda said.

"We don't both need to be overtired," Sharon said.

Brenda clenched at the braid in her hand and then cleared her throat, let it go and dropped her arm down to her side.

"Right, but I just thought-"

"BRENDA!" Ashley's voice rang out across the yard and into the little greenhouse. "I HAVE MY BRUSH!"

Brenda winced. "I told her I'd braid her hair like mine," she said.

"Smart girl," Sharon said reaching out but not quite touching one of the braids. "Looks good on you."

They walked back to the house together and broke off from there, Sharon heading back into the kitchen to play housewife with Amelia and Brenda into the living room, where she could braid Ashley's hair in front of the television. Sesame Street was on and Ashley even hugged Brenda when she was fished.

oooo

It was easy to avoid everything until they sat down to dinner. She played an elaborate game of barbie dolls with Ashley, she talked football with Al's father, Dean. She and Kelly ran to the store to pick up a last minute bag of ice because the ice maker was acting up again - the one less than perfect thing in Amelia's house she'd encountered so far, besides herself.

Al's mother, Betty, spent most of the day in the kitchen with Amelia and Sharon. Brenda could hear them chatting and laughing all day and felt weird and other. Like she was a child, not an adult, like she'd be sitting at the little table with Ashley by the time dinner rolled around.

Just before dinner was served at three o'clock, she went upstairs to freshen up. She unraveled her own braids and instead pinned her bangs back. Her hair looked wavy instead of curly and she instantly looked older. She was leaning over the sink, darkening her lashes with mascara when she heard someone come into the room.

Sharon was gripping the bottom of her t-shirt, about to pull it over her head when Brenda cleared her throat.

"Jesus!" Sharon said, jumping, her hand moving to the base of her neck. "I didn't know you were there."

"I didn't mean to scare you," Brenda said. "I was trying to avoid just that."

"I just came up to change," Sharon said. "Try to look a little nicer."

"Me too," she said. "Just my hair."

Sharon hesitated.

"Sorry, I'll just… I'll let you have some privacy." Brenda felt strange saying it. She wasn't certain what to do with Sharon's complete lack of reaction to the previous night's activities. Maybe Sharon didn't remember? That seemed unlikely. She was beginning to suspect that this was just how Sharon dealt with emotional upheaval. She shut down.

Brenda turned back to the mirror and picked up the tube of her light pink lipstick. She drug it across her bottom lip and tapped it along the top and then pressed her lips together.

Sharon darkened the doorway, now it a dark green button down blouse.

"Brenda," she said. "Do you… I hope you're not upset with me."

"Upset?" Brenda asked, confused. "I'm not upset, I'm…" She was confused. She was wary. She was concerned. "Are you upset?"

"No," Sharon said. "Yes. It was a bad idea, but I'm not upset with you."

"With me," Brenda said. "Who are you upset with?"

"Myself," Sharon said. "You brought me with you, introduced me to your friends and I took advantage-"

"You did not take advantage of me," Brenda cut her off. "Let's be real clear here, that wasn't what happened."

Sharon shut her mouth, eyes wide.

"We can talk about it," Brenda said. "But now certainly is not the time."

"Sorry," Sharon said. "You're right. God, you're right."

Brenda nodded. "Okay, then." She took a deep breath and then managed a nervous giggle. "I know you've been workin' hard all day."

"The fun kind of work," Sharon said. "Better than sitting around thinking about the kids all day."

Brenda wanted to reach out and grasp her hand, give it a comforting squeeze. Yesterday, she would've done it. Yesterday, she had. Instead she said, "There's a phone in the office. Why don't you go give them a call before dinner?"

"You don't think they'd mind?" Sharon asked.

"I don't," Brenda said. "Not even a little."

Downstairs was chaos, Ashley running around with her Cabbage Patch doll swinging wildly behind her, Al and Amelia were in the kitchen with Betty having a strained conversation about why the rolls were still cooking and the rest of the food was ready and waiting and somehow, Dean had ended up with Kimberly who was working up from a whimper into a real cry.

Kelly was nowhere to be seen.

"Here," Brenda said, walking up to Dean. "You mind if I take her for a spin?"

"I suppose that would be all right," Dean said, though he looked grateful and handed the baby over with no hesitation. Brenda could tell the moment she got hold of the baby that she had a soggy diaper. She looked into the kitchen and saw Amelia with her hand on her hip, never a fantastic sign.

"Because I just have one oven, Betty," Amelia said pointedly.

"Oh, we got time," Brenda said and headed toward the back of the house where the playroom was.

Inside it was painted a pale pink and there were toys all over the floor. Barbies, little ponies, legos, a whole harem of dolls. But in one corner was a changing table, placed there so Amelia didn't have to go upstairs every time the baby needed a change.

"Okay, honey bunny," Brenda said, protecting her head as she lowered her to the pad on the table. "Let's see if we remember how to do this."

She had to take the purple pants off completely and then undo some snaps only to find that Kimberly had on a cloth diaper, pinned into place. Brenda had only ever used disposable diapers. It's what her niece Charlie had used and what Sharon had put on Rusty. Most daycares required them at this point, but Amelia had a nanny that came in during the day and from the look of the logo onto of the dirty diaper bin, a diaper service.

Of course she did. Why choose one thing when you could choose a slightly more expensive thing?

"How hard can it be?" Brenda asked unpinning the soiled diaper. She just had to reverse engineer what she was taking off, and the shelf below was stocked with diapers that were pre-folded. Kimberly gurgled and flailed all her chunky limbs. There was a soft rattle on the table near her head so Brenda handed it to her and she grasped it, navigating it easily into her mouth. This distracted her enough for Brenda to get the diaper off and disposed of in the bin.

Kimberly had a little diaper rash, so she wiped her with a wipe and dabbed on some of the cream she found.

"See? This ain't even hard at all," Brenda said, smug.

She reached for a folded diaper and as she lifted it it, it immediately came unraveled into just a piece of cloth.

"Okay, well, that one was practice."

The second one unraveled as she was trying to negotiate it under Kimberly.

"Damn," Brenda said and then, touching the baby's nose said, "Don't tattle on me for swearin'."

She managed to get the third diaper on and even pinned without stabbing herself or the baby but when she lifted her up, the diaper fell off because she hadn't pinned it clear through on one side and not tightly enough on the other.

Kimberly started to fuss.

"Brenda?" Al's voice down the hall. "Here you are."

"Turns out I'm not good at everything," she said. He chuckled.

"I hate the things but my mother bought us the service so we feel like we have to," he said in a low voice. "For the whole first year."

"Gotcha," she said.

"We're about to eat," he said. "Go on, we'll be right there."

And everyone was in the formal dining room, not seating but hovering around their places. The table wasn't quite big enough to fit everyone so, Kelly and Ashley were seated at the coffee table in front of the TV in the living room.

"I volunteered," Kelly said, lifting her glass of wine to Brenda with a wink.

Amelia and Al were at the ends, his parents one one side and Brenda and Sharon on the other. There were little place cards with their name in gold pen and little rust colored cornucopias that matched the large, real one in the middle, surrounded by cream colored candles.

It was a little much, to her taste, but they all gushed. Sharon came down the stairs just as Al returned with Kimberly and though Sharon was all smiles, her eyes were rimmed with red. Al put the baby in the highchair next to Amelia's seat and then they all gathered and sat together.

"Thought we'd say grace before we brought out the food," Amelia said.

"That'll give the rolls enough time to finish browning," Betty said.

Amelia rolled her eyes and Al said, loudly, "I'll pray!"

Everyone reached out and grasped hands.

Sharon gave her hand a little squeeze.

oooo

"What is that?" Sharon asked, reaching for the lamp and flicking it on, squinting.

"My pager," Brenda said, feeling a very peculiar mix of guilt and anger. She glanced at the bathroom door but it was closed. Kelly had been moved to an air mattress in Ashley's room to make space for Al's parents, so they'd all been more careful about closing the doors to the bathroom, though all they'd done was sleep.

"What time is it?" Sharon asked, reaching for her glasses and slipping them on. She answered her own question, reading the clock. "It's after midnight."

"Technically no longer Thanksgiving," Brenda muttered. "Assholes."

"So don't call," Sharon said.

"They got a real habit of ruining my life when I ignore them," Brenda said. "I agreed to do this until I graduated, so I gotta do it."

She finally dug the pager out of her bag and silenced it. She leaned against the dresser and rubbed her face. She did want to ignore them, she did. But she didn't want suspicious looking cars parking outside of Sharon's house, watching her or her children; she didn't want ghosts from her past showing up to make threats.

"I'm gonna go call, I'll be right back."

But weirdly enough, Sharon got up and followed her into the the office. There was no point in arguing in the dark hallway, no point after they were closed up in the office, tired and bleary in the bright overhead light that came on when Brenda flipped the switch.

"What if they want you there right now?" Sharon asked.

"They know where I am," Brenda said, picking up the phone on the desk. She tucked it against her shoulder and dialed the number on the pager.

"Hello?"

Her voice again.

"Agent Aurora, Savannah," she said. "Y'all know well and good that I ain't even in Los Angeles."

"I do," he said. "The FBI has requested your presence at their San Diego office."

"Oh," Brenda said. "Can they do that?"

"Can they do what?" Sharon asked. Brenda glanced over her shoulder and shushed her.

"What time?"

"First thing in the morning," her voice said. "Eight am."

"So why on earth are they pagin' me now?" she said.

"Oh, ah, well," her voice said. "That was me. I figured the more notice you had the better. Was I incorrect?"

"No," Brenda said. "No, thank you. Tell them… tell them I accept. May I have the address, please?"

He sounded relieved when he said, "You may."

When she hung up she said, "FBI," before she thought much about it and then said, "Uh, I'm not sure how best to play this."

"We'll get up early, we'll explain that I have to get home to my children," Sharon said. "I'm happy to shoulder the blame here."

"You don't have to-"

"I know this is a difficult situation you're in, even if you talk about it like it isn't." Sharon gave her a pained smile. "Let me help you."

"You'll have to come with me," Brenda said. "It might take all day."

"One more day with you?" Sharon asked stepping closer. "I can handle that."

Brenda reached out and took her hand, stood there when Sharon leaned in and pressed their lips together.

A voice in the back of her head told Brenda that Sharon would pull away again in the morning, that Sharon would have more regrets, but Brenda ignored the voice and melted into the kiss all the same.

oooo

The alarm went off at six and Brenda got into the shower while Sharon packed up her bag. Then they switched. Brenda didn't have much to wear - they'd planned to go home today and all Brenda had brought was a pair of jeans and a pink and cream striped sweater so that's what she put on.

It was her mistake and one she'd learn from. There were no vacations from this - she needed to always be prepared to be called in.

Sharon came into the room in her towel and Brenda stared, entranced by her freckled shoulders, by her dark hair dripping at the ends, by her baby pink toes and perfect calves and….

"Stop," she said, tucking her wet hair behind her ear. "You're looking at me like…"

"Sorry," Brenda mumbled, pulling her shoes out of her bag and then struggling to close the zipper.

But when she looked back up, Sharon was smirking.

Amelia was in the kitchen when Brenda went down to try to round up some coffee for her and Sharon. She was sitting at the island looking at the newspaper with Kimberly at her breast.

"I didn't expect to see anyone so early," Amelia said. "Al and Ash are late risers."

"Actually," Brenda said. "We have to go."

"What?" Amelia asked. "We were gonna do breakfast."

"I know," Brenda said. "Sharon wants to get home to her kids and then you can have real family time."

"You're family," Amelia said.

"You and me, maybe," she said. "Me and Betty?"

Amelia snorted. "Consider yourself lucky."

Brenda smiled at her. "Thank you for having me. Thank you for taking her in last minute."

"Anytime," Amelia said. "Next time we'll come to you."

Amelia made them both to go cups of coffee, telling them she'd have to come visit to get her travel mugs back and sent them on their way, promising that she'd pass along their goodbyes.

Sharon drove, pointed the car downtown and Brenda trusted that she would get them there.

"What do you think they'll ask you to do?" Sharon asked. There was a little traffic on the freeway, not a normal commute but it certainly wasn't clear.

"Hard to say," Brenda said. "Last time it was translating tapes. The time before that, an interrogation that I helped exactly zero with."

"And when we call you?" Sharon asked.

"Depends," Brenda said. "I honestly… I never feel like I help all that much. If they called me at the beginning, if I could see everything happen in real time, then maybe I could… but I always come in at the end, after everything has already been screwed up by someone and they expect me to just fix it…"

Sharon snorted. "Of course."

"At best I tell them where they went wrong. Sometimes I get them confirmation of something they already expected. Or, I'm the only one around who speaks Russian that day."

"You speak Russian?" Sharon asked.

"A little," Brenda said. "Anyway, if it's gonna take forever, you should go home and I can find someone to bring me back."

"I'm not leaving you to the wolves!" Sharon said.

Brenda chuckled at that and Sharon shot her a quizzical look that Brenda understood, though it did nothing to motivate her to explain.

To her knowledge, Brenda had only killed three people, albeit indirectly. Elena and little Yeva and the husband, probably too, though he could still be alive somewhere, a prisoner of some civil war, but she knew that was at least the same as dying, if not worse.

But three seemed low to Brenda because she was smart enough to know that the information she extracted wasn't used to improve foreign infrastructure or provide school lunches to hungry children or medical aid to countries who could not progress when all their citizens were dying of malaria. No, the sort of information she'd gotten good at retrieving caused people to die. Sometimes foreign people, sometimes disloyal Americans. It had never been Brenda's job to worry about the consequences, only the interrogation. Only the glimmer of truth that she alone panned out from the silt of lies.

So Brenda chuckled because it was funny. Brenda wasn't going to succumb to the wolves.

Brenda was the wolf.

oooo

It was a drug bust, the FBI partnering with the DEA and Brenda had been called into triage the interrogations. Each high level player in the crack cocaine ring had to be ranked and processed and spoken to in order to get the most useful information out of them. So while agents were rounding everyone up, Brenda was in with the thug who'd flipped, getting a sense of who to expect and who actually had the information they'd need to make an airtight case.

She'd had to pitch a fit about allowing Sharon to stay with her.

"She's the LAPD officer in charge of making sure no one else gets slapped with an internal affairs audit," Brenda had said, making Sharon dig her badge out of her purse. "If you're working with the DEA and the locals, do you really think it's going to hurt anything to have someone watching our backs, too? Keeping everything above board? You want some cop to punch a drug dealer in the face and then everyone gets to walk free because you didn't let one out of jurisdiction officer cross your drawbridge?"

They'd had to wait nearly forty-five minutes while calls were made but finally they gave them access badges with a scowl. Sharon had leaned over to say, "I'm not exactly in charge-"

"Hush," Brenda had said. "Close enough."

"She's your responsibility, Johnson," the gruff special agent had said with a warning as they clipped on their badges. Brenda did not felt threatened by that in the slightest.

In the elevator Sharon had stared at her in awe.

"You talk to these guys like…"

"Like I'm not a tiny girl?" Brenda said. "Yeah, I know. It goes better when I'm not wearing a pink sweater."

"Does it?" Sharon asked. She looked unconvinced.

Brenda shrugged. "Nobody ever likes me. That's an unrealistic expectation. When you just let that go, everythin' gets easier."

Sharon gave her an intense look of admiration and something else. Something that made Brenda's spine tingle.

"I'm the first woman you've ever slept with, aren't I?" Brenda asked. She didn't mean to, but the words came out and she knew the answer before she even finished the sentence. Sharon's face went from lust to shock and then shut down completely.

"That wasn't an accusation. You didn't do anythin' wrong," Brenda said.

"I'm married, I have three kids and… two kids and you live in my garage," Sharon said. "What we did certainly wasn't right."

The elevator stopped, the doors parted. It was Brenda's fault for bringing it up. She could never just let it lie.

An agent was there to greet them, Brenda made herself smile when they locked eyes.

"Here we are," she said, just as sweet as honey. "Where do ya want us?"

oooo

Brenda drove the jeep back to Los Angeles; Sharon slept in the passenger's seat.

Brenda pushed the buttons on the radio, cycling through the presets. Elton John, and then that sad song about Eric Clapton's dead kid. She hurried past that, glancing over at Sharon. That woman singing about how she wished she was your lover. Brenda could handle a few bars of that and then changed her mind, pushing the last button.

Christmas music.

That was safe. It also reminded her that she needed to buy a ticket to go home. That she needed to not come home empty handed, that she needed to think further than 5 minutes ahead.

She'd been wondering what they were going to do when she went back to Atlanta for a week, but now she knew. They'd loan her out there, too, and her daddy wouldn't be so forgiving about her wanting to borrow a car at two in the morning without an explanation of where she was going. And what would that explanation be?

That somewhere along the way, she'd made a mistake? That that mistake, whether it was recruitment or Minsk or leaving her job, was going to follow her no matter where she ran to. She looked over at Sharon again and knew that was a mistake, too. It hadn't felt like it, and to Brenda it still didn't, but she knew Sharon thought it was.

Sharon's head was slumped down and her half of the car was in the sun, the light slanted across her hips as the sun set over the water. They'd be home in time to pick up the kids, eat dinner, and put them to bed.

The carol on the radio ended and a cheerful sounding DJ started loudly talking; Sharon shifted in her seat and then opened her eyes. She looked at the clock first and then over at Brenda.

"I'm sorry that I complicated things for you," Brenda said. Sharon blinked at her owlishly from behind her glasses and then pushed them up onto her head as she sat up. She rubbed her face with both hands and then sighed and rolled her eyes.

"You probably think I'm some sad old woman who is having a midlife crisis," she said, laughing dryly at herself. "You probably think I'm pathetic."

"I don't," Brenda said. "Actually, I think you're kinda hot."

"Stop," Sharon said, though she smiled. And then, "I didn't know you… you know. Liked women."

Brenda shrugged. "I'm not sure I have a preference, actually. Men or women."

"And your parents, what do they think about-"

"Oh no," Brenda said laughing nervously. "No, no, no. I don't even tell them about the men let alone the woman. Could you imagine? My daddy would have an aneurysm."

"Ah," Sharon said. "Just one woman then."

"Oh," Brenda said. "Well, two now, I guess. Countin' you."

"Counting me," Sharon said. "What happened… never mind, that's really not any of my business."

"It's all right," Brenda said.

"Just because my ex is an extroverted asshole…"

"It just ended badly, that's all. And then I moved away." Brenda shrugged, signalling to move around a big truck. They were on the outskirts now, closer to home than from where they left.

"You're very smart," Sharon said. "Watching you today was… you're really smart and pretty and I think that… I can see how I let myself… because you're…"

"You don't have to explain anythin'," Brenda said when Sharon couldn't seem to go on.

"My issue is," Sharon continued, "that you're going to actually be my student."

"Shoot," Brenda said. "You're right."

"Yeah," Sharon said. "We can't…"

"No, I get it," Brenda said. "That would be really inappropriate."

"Very," Sharon said.

"It's fine," Brenda said. "Just a one time thing, then."

Sharon nodded once, authoritatively. "Agreed."

Brenda eased the car back into the right hand lane, her hands tight on the wheel.