So his walk into Beverly Hills that morning was to go past the doctor’s office on Bedford Drive, three blocks west of Rodeo, with the intention not of going in, but just to be comforted by the knowledge of its presence. A doctor who had known him all his life and who he knew in three weeks he was going to need. He received that comfort, seeing the name of the practice on the board displaying the occupants of 420 Bedford Drive.

*

But this fresh day, with Lomita and a hangover in his head, brought about a journey to a different venue.

To the lawyer’s office on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

An easy car ride, it was just off Highway 101, and after travelling a block past the exit he was pulling up in the parking lot looking for a shaft of shade in which to park his Utah-plated rental. A good deal he had crafted through Hotwire on a new-model Land Rover Discovery, so he felt he was moving around this familiar, but nonetheless foreign country in a little haven of the old country. He had picked it up at the Sixt rental company on La Cienega.

‘It came in from Utah. That’s got to be seven hundred miles I guess. Salt Lake City. Never been myself.’

The rental man spoke with deliberation and pride. Either in the achievement of the car or his country. It was his country, of course, thought Ever. This is America after all. It was a pride in his country.

*

Ever just saw it as a lucky escape from Salt Lake City, a place where it was hard to get a drink, so he didn’t much care for it, and neither, he was sure, did the car; its main concern was to be put in some shade. A tree was all there was but the sun would move and he knew he would return to an oven. An English oven, built in Liverpool, and owned by India.

The elevator released him on the third floor. He had spruced himself up and put on the grey suit jacket that he had neatly hung on the little hook supplied by the rear seat grab handle.

Ron Riley Associates, Attorney at Law, the plaque said, printed on plastic. He thought that it needed the gravitas of brass.

Ever was standing in front of a blank-faced receptionist, one he’d never seen there before, she was listening with a vagueness that seemed to place her elsewhere, he was in the process of spelling his name. A man he had known his whole life arrived to interrupt at double LL. This man who had named his son Everett. Not out of any kind of admiration for Ever as a person, he was only two at the time, but just because he liked the name. Everett.