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shot three since she was twelve and also a cow elk over near Lincoln. Sarah confessed that though she had gone hunting a dozen times with Tim she had yet to pull the trigger on an animal. Before doing so Tim wanted her to be able to fire five shots within a five-inch pattern at a hundred yards with either his .270 or .30-06. The girls agreed with this and said that there was plenty of time to practice before hunting season.
    This meeting gave Sarah an expansive but brief relief from her sleepwalking mood which affects anyone who has experienced the recent death of a beloved. She had no one to turn to because her friend Priscilla was a pleasant nitwit and her father had emotional limitations. His own son was near death and he was flying back to South Carolina in a day but he couldn’t say a single thing about Tim or Brother.
    She put the irritable Lad away in the horse barn with hay and water but no oats. It occurred to her that Lad had misbehaved in part because he wasn’t used to being around a crowd which only reminded her of her own stunted access to people. On the way to the 4-H heifer barn where the 4-H club camped out her mind flared in anger at the whole idea of homeschooling and that she had been a puppet of her parents’ daffy ideas that though you had to live within the culture you could minimize the bad effects by staying as remote as possible. Now she found herself quite happy that Peppy had run off with the rich rancher because finally she could join the human race.
    In the box stall she and Priscilla had as a camping spot Sarah lay down on her sleeping bag spread on fresh alfalfa which had a sweet, haunting odor. Priscilla had been sent home by their leader Mrs. Lahren to get some different clothes to replace her very short short-shorts. “Young woman, your ass flaps are sticking out!” she said and everyone laughed. Sarah was thinking that everyone touches each other and hugs but she had mostly just petted Rover. She slid a hand in Priscilla’s pack feeling the usual condoms and then she reached what she wanted, a small rack of two-ounce shooters of Kahlúa. Sarah didn’t care for whiskey or beer but she liked the coffee-chocolate flavor of Kahlúa. Priscilla would ride to the liquor store in the county seat with her mother when she restocked the village tavern. While Giselle was choosing stock Priscilla would go into the walk-in cooler with the geeky clerk who was in his midthirties and let him suck her breasts for a minute in exchange for a dozen Kahlúa shooters. When she heard the story Sarah had said, “You’re so biological,” and Priscilla had answered, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
    Sarah lay splayed on her back listening to the Grateful Dead on her tape deck wondering how a tiny bottle of booze could make you feel that much better. She slept for two hours until dinnertime.
    In a hall in the middle of the fairgrounds they had their annual beef barbecue. Outside there were a number of steer halves roasting on wood-fired grills. There were at least five hundred diners who drank beer and gorged on the meat. Whiskey was banned on the fairgrounds but most men carried their own bottles anyway. When dinner was over all the tables were pushed off to the side and a country band that had traveled over three hundred miles from Billings began setting up their equipment. Mrs. Lahren had insisted that Sarah do the warm-up for the band on an upright piano. Sarah had snuck off to the toilet to have another Kahlúa which she downed in a single gulp feeling her body suffused with warmth. Nearly all of the young people would have preferred a rock band but ranchers controlled the fair and at least Sarah’s ragtime and boogie-woogie was a compromise. She didn’t have to look to play and she exchanged glances with the country band fiddler who was plugging in amplifiers. Priscilla had told her all about the band. The fiddler who was big and