Dead Dry by Sarah Andrews

a geologist.”
    Gilda blinked. She kept watching me, her face limp.
    “I knew Afton in Denver. I’m a friend of Julia’s.”
    Gilda waved a hand dismissively. “Oh. Julia.”
    “Yeah. I haven’t seen the kids since they were really little.” I was getting really angry at this woman. Why? Because
she’d just insulted my friend? Surely I had more compassion than that; a woman in shock over a loss of this magnitude could be forgiven for a lapse of manners, but the beauty-parlor hair, the expensive “nothing” dress, the exotic sandals, and the air of privilege had gotten under my skin. I struggled to get a grip on myself. “Was Afton still doing any geology?” I asked.
    Gilda waved a hand toward the log cabin. “As long as you two aren’t going to take no for an answer, it’s up there,” she said as she disappeared into the yurt, closing the canvas door behind her.
    I headed over to the cabin double-quick. The door was locked, but I was able to see what I needed to see through the windows.
    The one-room structure was neat as a pin but was clearly a site where work was being done. Two walls were lined with bookcases filled with geological texts. There was a flat file for maps and an old-fashioned drafting table and stool with plenty of work laid out on it. Proudly displayed on top of an old-fashioned oak file cabinet rested a four-inch tri-cone drill bit that had been bronzed. I recognized it from his office in Denver years earlier, when it had sat on his desk there. It was the completion bit from his discovery well, which had made Afton McWain a millionaire.
    The remaining two walls were papered with geologic cross-sections, a type of diagram that geologists create to examine how layers of rock connect from one location to another. They represent vertical slices into the Earth. If you cut a chocolate cake in half and just looked at the inside, you’d get the same sort of view, except that rock doesn’t tend to come in quite such tidy layers, and in fact, “layer-cake geology” is a term reserved for places where the rock layers are unusually flat and continuous.
    Judging by the labels he had put on them, Afton McWain’s cross-sections transected the Denver Basin north to south and west to east. Next to the “N” for “North” he’d also written “Greeley,” which is a city at the north
edge of the basin, and next to “S” for “South” he’d inscribed “Colorado Springs,” which lies at the south. Instead of a town’s name by “W” for “West,” he’d written “Wildcat Mountain,” which was apparently a topographic feature somewhere nearby, as just to the right of that he’d written “Sedalia.” “E” for “East” was tagged “Last Chance,” a town on the eastern plains of Colorado, about as far from civilization as you’d ever want to get a flat tire. I ought to know, I’ve done it, driving a cattle trailer for my dad back when he was selling off some bulls.
    Remembering my cattle ranch beginnings was something that was bound to happen as I stood there staring into that log cabin. The original part of the house I grew up in on my father’s ranch wasn’t much bigger than this one, but Dad had kept it up proudly, leaving the insides of the logs showing as well as the outside, just as Afton McWain had done.
    Looking into his workspace, I began to remember the parts of Afton that I’d enjoyed knowing, the same parts that Julia first noticed: his intelligence and his fastidiousness and his interest in the quality of life. On that same field trip where he’d showed off his buttocks, he had also made sure that everyone ate well, a detail that escapes a lot of field-trip organizers. Instead of hustling the ubiquitous box lunches with gummy white bread sandwiches and tiny packets of potato chips, he’d supplied deli breads, whole hams that he’d had run through a slicer, bricks of cheese, nice lettuces, and crocks of condiments. He’d understood that to get his point across,