Laura opened her eyes and looked at the roof of the truck. The sun was low and she felt her eyes tearing. She folded down the sun visor, and noticed a piece of paper taped to it.

She sat up a bit and looked more closely.

“Hey, guys,” she said softly.

“Yes?” said Nina and Polly in unison. It had gone quiet in the store; clearly they had chased out the last of the ice cream–dripping customers.

“Do you remember I told you Bob and I went out to Denny’s one time, after we went gardening?”

“Yes,” snorted Polly. “The worst date ever? That one?”

“I don’t know what you have against Denny’s,” said Nina. “I love Denny’s.”

Polly snorted again.

“Anyway,” continued Laura, “Bob has the receipt for that dinner taped to his sun visor. And he’s written my name on it.”

There was a pause. Then Polly said, “Maybe he wants to remember to get your half of the check back?” There was a thump, and she said, in a hurt tone of voice, “I can’t believe you threw a book at me.”

Nina said, “Laura, I realize you’re freaked out by driving, and that it’s a lot to ask, to drive in a strange city and on the freeway, but the guy taped a Denny’s receipt where he could see it several times a day, for crying out loud, so I really think you need to pull it together and get back on the road.”

Laura took a deep breath. “You’re right,” she said, and turned the engine back on. She looked at the receipt again, and felt desperately keen to both see Bob and kiss him quite a lot.

The 10 freeway, which was the freeway Laura was about to cautiously merge onto, is the southernmost interstate highway, running from Santa Monica in the west all the way to Florida in the east. It is regarded as a fairly sporting freeway by Los Angeles natives, who enjoy its generous speed limit and tend to think of it as “indicator optional.” Laura was pretty scared as she joined the heavy traffic traveling en masse at speeds of around seventy miles an hour, and once she was on it, there was no way in hell she was going to try to get off.

“Are you on the 10?” asked Nina.

“Uh-huh,” said Laura, swallowing hard. Cars whizzed by and then slammed on their brakes for no reason, vehicles changed lanes like teens at the roller rink, and every so often an extremely fast car with zero muffler whatsoever would speed past, cutting in front of her so closely she could count the piercings in the driver’s ears, and then nip into yet another lane, as if the point of the exercise were to cross the white dividing lines as many times as possible. Maybe it was.