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pretty much all alone, and we get ourselves along just fine. Sidney is bigger, Billings is where nearly everybody goes to see a dentist or a specialty doctor, and Bozeman and Missoula seem to pull our kids away from us—those places, or the smell of oil—but we just keep on keeping on. So I figure it’s my duty to do what my daddy did, to be there for my town the way he was.”
    Sam glanced to his left and for the first time realized that the photographer was snapping shots as he spoke. He turned the other way, his back to the camera. “I’ve probably said enough.”
    “You were great,” Wanda said. She reached out and grasped his elbow, and Sam felt a silly fluttering through his chest and stomach.
    “I have just one more question,” she said.
    “OK.”
    “What worries you most about the future of Grandview?”
    She turned to face him after asking the question, and Sam suddenly felt a gravity that hadn’t been in the conversation before. He took his hat off again and held it in front of him, caressing the bill between his thumbs and forefingers.
    “We’re getting old,” he said. “The mayor, he’s been in office thirty-three years. I’m fifty-three. We had thirty-one graduates in May, but just twenty-one the year before. Most of those kids are gone, and they aren’t gonna be coming back, except maybe to visit for something like Jamboree. The lady who runs our museum, Myrtle Davis, she’s eighty-three. Who’s going to run this town? Some oil-stained rig jockey? I don’t see any of them interested in that.
    “Meanwhile, Sidney’s growing. They’d love to have our tax base. We’re probably going to need their water treatment capacity sooner or later. Are they just going to swallow us up? A lot of people think so. I can’t help but think we’d be losing more than we know if that happens.”
    He turned back to the view. The photographer’s camera fired off clicks.
    “Do you have kids, Sam?”
    “Two.”
    “What about them?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Why aren’t they following you the way you followed your father?”
    It was a hell of an audacious question, yet delivered so dispassionately that Sam didn’t take it in the hard way he might have had, say, Patricia dropped it at his feet. But then, he didn’t have any history with this Wanda Perkins person, and he and the missus had history enough to fill a dozen coal trains. What struck him even more is that he hadn’t considered it. The kids’ hard break with the place—Denise living there in Billings like she was born to it, Samuel just a whisper in their lives—had made it clear that they wouldn’t move the chains even before Sam had acknowledged his own limitations.
    “They have their own things going on,” he said.
    The sun had turned now, making its downward rappel toward the western horizon. It backlit the scene, casting the yonder badlands in alternating shadows and fresh splashes of color.
    “It’s a lovely town,” Wanda Perkins said. “Not what I expected.”
    Sam put his cap back on, mindful of the sun and of the tender skin under his fast-thinning hair.
    “Best place in the world,” he said.

NORBY
    Norby hunkered down in his hotel room, with a meal from Denny’s in a Styrofoam box, his phone, and the fifty-six channels on the TV set. He felt better, though, perhaps as good as he’d felt all day. When the jet banked over the Yellowstone River and made the final approach into Billings, he’d looked down at the city and felt a stirring he hadn’t expected. Anticipation. Desire, even. He wouldn’t have imagined that.
    He couldn’t get over how much the place had changed, how vibrant it seemed relative to his memories and his biases. A funny place, Billings. It fueled an entire region, with a banking center, first-class health care, and the might of more than a hundred thousand souls, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone eager to love it. Billings was car lots and office towers and windblown buttes. If it’s