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end of that summer she was gigging with Dwayne’s band, a sub-legendary group that went by the name of Branchwater, fronted by another of Laramie’s purveyors of illegal substances, the amoral Sam Branch. That had led to several years of making a hair-raising living in clubs and bars all over the Northern Rockies, and dragging her ass into the Wrangler for Monday morning hash browns and eggs with Dickie and Delice.
    Sally had enrolled in grad school in history at UW, just to have something legitimate to do, and found that she’d accidentally discovered her calling. She’d ended up heading back to California, gotten a Ph.D. at Cal, taught women’s history at UCLA. It was a good enough life, but she’d known some lonesome times in the big city.
    So when she’d gotten the offer to return to Laramie and the University of Wyoming sixteen years later, as the holder of the Margaret Dunwoodie Endowed Chair and head of the Dunwoodie Center for Women’s History, she’d jumped on it. To her infinite delight, not only had she and Hawk found each other again, but the Lang-hams took up with her exactly where they’d left off. Of course, Langhams knew how to welcome their prodigals home.
    So Sally played a little music with Dwayne, hung out a lot with Delice, and cadged dinner at Dickie and Mary’s at least once a week. She’d come to think of herself as an aunt to their nearly grown kids, especially Mary and Dickie’s daughter Brit. Gorgeous, amusingly sulky, and bright as a golden Sacagawea dollar, Brit had worked for Sally when she was writing Meg Dunwoodie’s biography. Indeed, Brit had played a big part in solving that particular human puzzle. The Langhams were as much family to Sally now as her own.
    And when she thought about it, they’d been Monette’s only family too. Her mother was dead, and her father— well, nobody ever had a good word to say about him.
    Sally could only begin to conceive of what the Lang-hams were going through. “What can I do to help out?” she asked Delice.
    On the other end of the line, Delice swallowed, sniffled, blew her nose. “We’re going to get together this morning at nine, over at Mary and Dickie’s. The coroner hasn’t released her body yet, but we’re going to plan the funeral, all that stuff. You could come over and hold everybody’s hand if you feel like it.”
    “Sure,” Sally said, “if you don’t think it would be an intrusion.”
    “We need you around. Brit’s here, but with the other kids gone, Mary’s feeling a little bereft.”
    “I’ll be happy to help Mary any way I can,” Sally said. She knew that Brit’s sister was in London with the university’s summer abroad program, and her little brother was up in the Wind River mountains with some survival school where they gave you a box of matches and a sharp stick and sent you out to live on snowmelt and lichens. Mothers needed their children at times like this, but in a pinch, friends helped.
    “Hell, if nothing else, it’ll be good to have you there to give Nattie somebody to whine at,” Delice said. Natalie Charlay Langham was Delice’s sister-in-law, Dwayne’s wife. Nattie had started out adulthood as a bartender at the Gallery, a low-rent watering hole that specialized in good bands, bad bathrooms, and steamy Saturday nights. By marrying Dwayne, who’d done very nicely in banking, Nattie had risen to become a Realtor, known for her garish ways of spending Dwayne’s money and her rather too obvious predilection for screwing around on her husband. Delice had remarked on many public occasions that she hoped Nattie would one day fuck herself into a divorce.
    Sally wasn’t much on Nattie either, but she sometimes found entertainment in trying to piss her off. “If it helps you to have me deal with her, I’m willing. I should probably eat some yogurt or something first, so that my stomach’s well-lined. Should Hawk come?”
    “Hawk’s welcome to come too, but if he’s got something else going