Mother and daughter ate a bit more artichoke dip and Michelle had a little more wine. Driving, she allowed herself two glasses before getting behind the wheel, no more.

The girl adjusted her pink floral headband and sipped a Diet Coke. She was in black jeans, not too tight—yay!—and a white sweater. Michelle was in blue jeans, tighter than her daughter’s, though that was a function of exercise failure, not a fashion statement, and a red silk blouse.

“Mom. San Francisco this weekend? Please. I need that jacket.”

“We’ll go to Carmel.” Michelle spent plenty of her real estate commissions shopping in the classy stores of the picturesque and excessively cute village.

“Jeez, Mom. I’m not thirty.” Meaning ancient. Trish was simply stating the more or less accurate fact that shopping for cool teen clothes wasn’t easy on the Peninsula, which had been called, with only some exaggeration, a place for the newly wed and the nearly dead.

“Okay. We’ll work it out.”

Trish hugged her and Michelle’s world glowed.

She and her daughter had had their hard times. A seemingly good marriage had crashed, thanks to cheating. Everything torn apart. Frederick (never Fred) moving out when the girl was eleven—what a tough time for that. But Michelle’d worked hard to create a good life for her daughter, to give her what had been yanked away by betrayal and the subsequent divorce.

And now it was working, now the girl seemed happy. She looked at her daughter with moon eyes and the girl noticed.

“Mom.” A sigh. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Lights down.

P.A. announcements about shutting off phones, location of fire exits, upcoming shows, were made by the gravel-voiced owner of the club himself. The venerable Sam Cohen, an icon in the Monterey Bay area. Everybody knew Sam. Everybody loved Sam.

Cohen’s voice continued, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, Solitude Creek, the premier roadhouse on the West Coast…”

Applause.

“Is pleased to welcome, direct from the City of Angels…Lizard Annie!”

Frantic clapping now. Hooting.

Out came the boys. Guitars were plugged in. The seat behind the trap set occupied. Ditto the keyboard.

The lead singer tossed his mass of hair aside and lifted an outstretched palm to the audience. The group’s trademarked gesture. “Are we ready to get down?”

Howling.

“Well, are we?”

The guitar riffs started. Yes! The song was “Escape.” Michelle and her daughter began to clap, along with the scores of others in the small space. The heat had increased, the humidity, the embracing scent of bodies. Claustrophobia notched up a bit. Still, Michelle smiled and laughed.

The pounding beat continued, bass, drum and the flesh of palms.

But then Michelle stopped clapping. Frowning, she looked around, cocking her head. What was that? The club, like everywhere in California, was supposed to be nonsmoking. But somebody, she was sure, had lit up. She definitely smelled smoke.

She looked around but saw no one with a cigarette in mouth.

“What?” Trish called, her eyes scanning her mother’s troubled expression.