Brown-Eyed Girl by Virginia Swift

victorious city league team, which was made up of wily aging jocks who called the team “Old, But Slow.” He asked Hawk if he was interested in joining, and Hawk said he’d think about it.
    Then Tom tried the personal angle one more time. “You married?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œSignificant other?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou free Saturday night?”
    Hawk considered. “I could be.”
    â€œMy wife,” said Tom, “is the best cook in southern Wyoming, possibly the whole state. We’re having some people over for dinner. You want to come?”
    Hawk smiled a little. “Do I look like some kind of lonesome bachelor who’d do anything for a home-cooked meal?”
    Tom put up his hands. “Hey, for all I know, you could be a psycho-killer, and I’ve just made a really stupid, indeed fatal mistake.”
    â€œNo,” said Hawk, “I’m a man of peace. And I’d do anything for a home-cooked meal.”

Chapter 8
A Wyoming Girlhood
    Sally had returned from El Conquistador to Margaret Dunwoodie’s house full, nervous, and curious. When a mood like this came on, all she could do was read and write. She went to the office, sat down at the beautiful desk, put on her funky LA-hip reading glasses and opened the folder labeled dunwoodie foundation official bio. Candor and contrivance leapt out at her this time: Meg had written this brief account of her own long life in the third person. Sally read it, then opened the folder Edna had given her and read through the transcript of the interview. Then, checking against the transcript for discrepancies, backing the tape up to repeat things she couldn’t quite make out, she listened to Margaret’s surprisingly steady old-lady voice on tape, answering Edna’s warm but pointed questions with an appearance of forthrightness that left much out. Sally paid close attention to the speed of Dunwoodie’s words, the hesitations, the places where she laughed and where the phrases sounded canned.
    Then she booted up her laptop, with the folders open in front of her on the desk. Sally opened a file she titled “Meg1” and began to construct her own first narrative of Margaret Dunwoodie’s life story.
    Margaret Parker Dunwoodie was born in Odessa, Texas, in 1904. Her father, McGregor “Mac” Dunwoodie, had been a wild West Texas cowboy who rode the range and the rails into Wyoming as the twentieth century bashed into life. Mac Dunwoodie found himself working cattle in the Saratoga and Centennial Valleys, and on his rare days off rode high into the Sierra Madres and Medicine Bows of southern Wyoming. He liked the wide sage basins, the switchback trails, the solitude, the feeling of thin, cold air and the look of frozen gray peaks. But he also liked the company he found in noisy barrooms, the prospect of greater comfort than a bedroll on the ground next to a fire that died long before dawn. He mended Wyoming fences, branded Hereford cattle, and resolved to find a way to make a fortune.
    So he took the stake he’d squirrelled away and went to the town of Laramie, to the infant state university. He’d decided to take a bachelor’s degree in science. He figured he’d learn enough about geology to go back to Texas and find himself a big old oil field. He could come back to Wyoming a rich man, have his pick of beautiful valleys, and spend the best years of his life as a gentleman rancher.
    Sally made herself a note: This was Mac’s Young Man Dream. As a rich old man, they said, he’d gone bitter and paranoid. How did he change along the way, if he did? When? What changed him?
    Gertrude Parker fit right into Mac Dunwoodie’s plan. She was a ranch girl with eyes as wide and blue as the Wyoming sky. Her folks had a place out south of Albany. Mac had seen her at the college, but never much talked to her until a box lunch picnic the first week of his last year at the University.