Early on in Joanna Brady’s relationship with Butch Dixon, he gave her a Colt 2000 as a gift.  Birthday present?  Mother’s Day?  Who knows?  I can’t remember which book it was, but it must have been a fairly early Joanna Brady because, at the time I wrote it, the Colt 2000 was brand new and supposedly the latest and greatest.

Except, it turns out that it wasn’t the greatest at all.  The handgun in question had reliability problems, including failure to extract spent shell casings.  There were accuracy issues as well as a recall.  Four years later it was withdrawn from the market.  Once I became aware of the issue, Joanna replaced her Colt 2000 with a Glock and has remained a GG (Glock Girl) ever since.

This week, while perusing the Internet, my husband found an article by Warrior Maven listing the top 5 worst hand guns ever made, and guess what.  The Colt 2000 was front and center.

Surprisingly enough, reading the article made me think about my mother, Evie Busk.  She was a farm girl, so there’s a good chance she may have fired a weapon on occasion, but I personally never witnessed it.  So why should an article about the demise of the Colt 2000 make me think about her?

There were seven kids in our family.  That meant that most of the time when we were growing up, she cooked three meals a day for nine people, doing so without benefit of either a microwave or an electronic dishwasher.  When my father retired from the insurance business, she laid down the law:  “If you’re retiring, I’m retiring.  The kitchen is closed!”

And she made it stick.  From then on they mostly went out for two meals a day, breakfast and a very early dinner.  They had several favorite haunts in and around Bisbee, but they also favored the truck stop at Road Forks, New Mexico, for some reason, as well as the Triple T, in Tucson.  Why not have a drive and a bit of an adventure with your evening meal?

They often dined at a place called Dixie’s Café in Bisbee, a long closed cafe recreated in the Joanna Brady books as Daisy’s.  Everyone in town knew Norm and Evie, and one day one of the Dixie regular’s came up to the table and took exception with the idea that I had put a non-existent weapon in one of my books.

My mother may not have known a whole lot about handguns, but she knew her daughter.  She took the poor guy straight to the mat and told him in no uncertain terms that if Judy put it in the book, she had a good reason to do so—and don’t you forget it, either!!   I don’t think he knew what hit him.

As for Evie?

I miss her.