Pilot: This Changes Everything; Mirabelle

The single most life-changing event for decent people is the birth of a first child. At the beginning of the third book (Canaan Camp), Richard is gainfully employed in a job that is as close as he will ever get to major law-enforcement. He is a rural “road deputy,” one step above an unpaid auxiliary deputy. Despite the lack of excitement (he’s had more than his share of that), he would be contented if it weren’t for his conviction that Jill has sacrificed her career to save him from his unmanly weakness. He would insist that they leave the hills and get her academic career back on track, but the very idea of giving up his “nothing job” is literally as depressing as approaching death.

Jill is settling into a community college, reasoning that being a professor in the Ozarks, although a far cry from being one in a prestigious university, is at bottom the same profession. Besides, she and Richard are living in the sort of place people go to “get away from it all,” which is good. It’s time for less drama in their lives. She is, of course, rationalizing. Yet Jill is convinced that she has made the wise choice in moving them to Blue Creek. Richard needs the job, and she needs him.

Then it happens. Normally meticulously careful, she inexplicably mismanages her birth control and becomes pregnant. Suddenly, the carefully-constructed new life she has worked out in order to save their marriage threatens to collapse. The last thing their fragile world needs is the complication of an unwanted child.

Richard, in typical male oblivion, thinks that Jill got pregnant in order to “fix” things by moving him past his moodiness. And it has as far as he’s concerned. He suddenly decides that he cannot afford to allow depression to dominate his life any longer. He sees her decision to have a baby as a vote of confidence in him. As far as he is concerned, this changes everything.

Jill is heartened by his reaction, but is far too wise and cautious to think that his demons can be exorcised so easily. She realizes something that Richard perhaps never will: he is suffering from PTSD. As her pregnancy proceeds, Jill becomes increasingly glad that she has engineered their move to the rural Ozarks. She has always dreamed of a having a loving family with the full complement of functioning parents, and thinks that Blue Creek will be a safe and wonderful world for their child to grow up in. Being a realist, however, she knows that problems will arise. No matter. She and Richard will be equal to the task.

They name their little girl after Jill’s only parent, her maiden aunt, Mirabelle.