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nearby bench.
    “Well, it’s about time you got here,” he said testily. He tried to rise to his feet, grabbing a startled Marillyn Mulholland’s arm for leverage. The pretty young woman who had been pushing his chair yesterday hurried to help. “Now, Grampa, we’ve only been waiting about ten minutes.”
    “At my age, I don’t have all that many ten minutes left to waste, Katie. Why are we hanging around here anyhow? I say we take my gun and just—”
    “We’re not doing guns,” Sally told him firmly. “Not yet, anyhow.”
    “Not yet ?” I said. “Sally?”
    Before she could answer, the hefty middle-aged man who hovered near the old woman asked the octogenarian gunslinger if he wanted his wheelchair back.
    “Naw, I can walk just fine if these two don’t let me fall.” Half pulling them along, shoulders humped with what looked like osteoporosis, he hobbled toward the double doors that opened into our old superior courtroom.
    As the others followed, I heard the same faint squeaking sound I had noticed when I first saw them earlier in the week but I couldn’t tell if it came from the wheelchair or from someone’s shoes.
    All the courtrooms in the new wing are stripped-down modern, but here in the original part of the building, it was dark oak benches, oak paneling, and large gilt-framed portraits of earlier superior court judges. All males. All white. The floor had a gentle slope and with the support of Marillyn and his granddaughter, the old man made it to the nearest bench and eased himself down stiffly. The rest found seats and the young woman showed the other man how to set the brake on the wheelchair.
    Sally pushed aside some of the exuberant blonde coils that had fallen over her eyes and said briskly, “Y’all, this is my cousin, Judge Deb’rah Knott. She’s gonna help us.”
    “She’s going to listen,” I corrected sternly.
    “Yeah, yeah,” said Sally, waving off my stipulation. “Judges can’t give legal advice, but she’ll listen to us and then we’ll listen to her.”
    She quickly introduced her friends.
    The woman in the wheelchair was Charlotte Ashton. Her caregiver was her sixty-something son Charles, who wore white socks and black leather orthopedic sandals that squeaked with every step he took. “Charlotte’s got Alzheimer’s, but she can still walk and she has good days when she can talk and understand.”
    The crusty old man was Spencer Lancaster. His granddaughter was Kaitlyn Lancaster.
    “You already know Marillyn. She helps look after her mother-in-law, who’s in the last stage of breast cancer.”
    “I’m Frances Jones,” said the remaining older woman. I put her at about seventy-five. She had a finely wrinkled face but she held herself erectly and her words were clear even if her voice was thin and trembly. “And this is my niece, JoAnn Bonner.”
    The niece looked to be three or four years younger than me. Like her aunt, she wore a cotton shirtwaist dress in a light flowery print. Both had sweet if somewhat plain narrow faces, both wore their straight hair in bangs. The niece’s hair was a light brown and tucked behind her ears; her aunt’s was white and curved into her chin line on either side. Neither woman struck me as someone who needed care.
    “Frances was one of the first Daughters,” said Sally. She had perched on the back of a heavy oak bench with her black leather boots planted on the seat. “Back then, she was taking care of her father and JoAnn’s little girl, too, while JoAnn worked.”
    “That little girl’s in college now,” JoAnn said in a soft voice. “Aunt Frances took us in after my family turned their backs on me when I got pregnant.”
    “And now JoAnn’s taken me in,” said Frances Jones. Her narrow face lit up when she smiled at her niece, and from the answering smile JoAnn gave her, I sensed a true fondness between the two women.
    “That’s why we’re here,” said Sally. “Frances finally told us why she’s losing her