When her father’s health started to deteriorate, his increasing days off brought no pay and that is when she was forced to find work. She was only sixteen, and had never in any case been considered academic, but she knew that her physical perfection and charm gave her a charisma that made people see her as a little bit special. She had been voted Most Beautiful Girl in her school, a surprise which had led her to enter beauty competitions – pageants – making her own clothes, having watched her mother for hours, moving the materials through the jackhammering needle of the electric machine.

She eventually won the title of Miss Pittsburgh 1959, having won the Rib and Reef Beauty Challenge at the restaurant in town that provided her and her father with all the food they could eat as a victory prize.

But it was the Miss Pittsburgh title that killed her friendship with Joan Happenstance, who came second. It ended a lifetime relationship, albeit a short lifetime, that Lomita had cherished.

With the sweet comes the sting.

It’s lonely at the top.

This final triumph earned her father many free beers in the local bars, their choice not his: he never bragged about his daughter. He was a quiet man, a phased-out man. A man committed to a path for which he acknowledged there was no choice.

The card that she had been given two years earlier lay on top of the cupboard in her bedroom next to a framed picture of her mother sitting proudly behind her Singer sewing machine.

Her mother had done alterations and tailoring for a pittance. The idea of recreating that life was terrifying to Lomita. It made her shiver now at the thought of it, but she hoped she had never made her parents feel they weren’t good enough.

She didn’t want to change dirty sheets in hotel bedrooms anymore, she wanted to fulfil her dream of being on the silver screen. She had no knowledge of what to do if she was ever put on the silver screen, but that did not deter her.

Her mother had taken her own life when Lomita was eleven years old.

She didn’t want to stay with that memory, she wanted to go back to thoughts of Bobby and ethereal beauty.

But there it was for Lomita, clear as day in her mind, the Singer sewing machine, the only thing she owned; her mother left it for her, with a little note.

I hope you never need to use it.