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was off-center, practically in one corner, and now Sally saw why. The living room, huge, high-ceilinged, and stretching across most of the front, looked like something out of a Fred Astaire movie. Tall windows stretched almost wall-to-wall, hung with sheers and silk. Creamy wool carpet, soft low sofas, overstuffed chairs, gleaming coffee tables, built-in bar, ashtrays the size of your head. Debonair silver floor lamps with sleek silk shades. A huge fireplace, faced with polished, pink-flecked gray granite Sally recognized as the same rock that composed the formations up at Vedauwoo in the Laramie Range.
    A lot of stuff, but not a trace of clutter. There was even a gigantic silver cigarette lighter, and a hinged silver book-shaped case full of ancient cigarettes, on one highgloss black lacquered end table. A huge crystal vase of pink gladioli presided over the coffee table. She thought she caught a faint whiff of Joy perfume. She could imagine Ginger Rogers in a marabou-trimmed silk dressing gown and high-heeled slippers, tapping a cigarette on the table, leaning over as Fred snapped open the lighter for her, stretching back into a chair and saying, “So tell me about the show, Johnny.”
    It seemed impossible that anyone had lived like this in Laramie. It was assuredly not possible that Sally could live here. Imagine some snowy afternoon dumping her wet book bag on a silk chair, throwing her down coat on the sofa. Her apartment in LA had been something in the nature of an extended sleeping bag.
    To the right of the front hall table, an arch into a narrow hall led to glossy wooden stairs carpeted with an oriental runner. She went up the stairs, noting that the ceiling in the second floor hallway had a pull-down door to an attic. On the left was a small spare bedroom and bath. She turned right into Margaret’s study—functional, but still remarkably large and graceful. A French empire desk, and matching chair with a needlepoint seat, was set out from the wall, freestanding on a large, pale oriental rug, facing windows that framed the canopy of the cottonwood in front of the house. Once again, Maude had added a touch, fresh garden flowers in a Spode teapot. No filing cabinets. Double doors on the wall behind the desk held a walk-in closet. She tried the doors, knowing they would be locked—the lawyer Sonnenschein had said he’d send her a key. A sofa sleeper covered in figured silk. Over the couch was a grouping of four framed pen and ink drawings. They were exquisite renderings of hands in different positions on the keys of a piano, etched in black on white, then washed with streaks of vivid red and blue watercolor, signed by someone named Blum. The cabinets held books (including all three of Sally’s!), a television, a modest stereo rig and records, mostly classical and jazz instrumentals. Lots of piano music. No piano in the house, though.
    Meg’s books were, of course, on the shelves, two thin, fine volumes from beautiful little presses, and of course the larger, slick-covered National Book Award collection, Rocks and Rage . She took it off the shelf. It fell open to one of Meg’s minor poems, one Sally happened to like particularly, “Between Memory and Hope”:
    A trembling tussle between memory and hope.
Moment to moment, transposes:
Tender brush of an unsuspected key.
    Quickens, jars,
Awakens, appalls,
One word whispered.
One flickering
    Flash of the blade,
Brush of the key,
A shifting half-step
Transforms, plays out.
    I was born of
an irresistible monster.
Bloody born alive,
Hope’s poison in my veins,
Remembering the brush of the key.
    Sally closed the book, turned to go back down the stairs. She was ready, now, to have a look at Meg’s (and Maude’s) garden, to listen to Maude describe, as she undoubtedly would, every plant variety, every weed and pest, the shapes of leaves, and where caterpillars hid in the crannies of the cauliflowers. And then she heard, for the