I don’t remember the name of the actress who played the woman with the baby carriage. I never saw her in another film, but she haunted me—not exactly like a ghost. I used to see her in line at my book signings, but she never showed up at the front of the line. I never got to sign her book. At my book signings, the woman wasn’t with a baby carriage. She really got to me, but she hadn’t once bothered to introduce herself. I sensed her dislike of the getaway driver. Maybe she disliked Paul Goode as a person, not only as an actor and a screenwriter.

Before I found out whether Paul Goode was my father or not, I didn’t like him. I especially don’t like him, as an actor or as a screenwriter, in this scene in the bar. This happens later in The Wrong Car, when we first find out that the getaway driver and the gun moll are a couple. I hate this scene.

INT. CITY BAR. NIGHT.

The getaway driver (no duckbill cap) is having a beer; he is evaluating himself in the mirror behind the bar when the moll comes in, cozying up to him on an adjacent barstool. She’s wearing his newsboy cap, or one just like it.

GUN MOLL

How’d it go, cutie pie?

GETAWAY DRIVER

(deadpan)

You know how it went.

(a pause)

Please take off that cap.

The moll puts the duckbill cap on the empty barstool beside her. She snuggles closer to the little driver.

GUN MOLL

Better?

GETAWAY DRIVER

Such an improvement.

CLOSER ON: Paul Goode’s shy, childlike smile.

FREEZE TO A STILL. FADE TO BLACK.

The woman with the baby carriage, that haunting woman from The Wrong Car, didn’t show up only at my book signings, but showing up was all she did—just appearing seemed to be her thing. I know. I’ve learned I should be careful not to generalize about ghosts.

Some evenings, when I was visiting my grandmother, either Nana or Dottie would persuade me to spend the night. I would have a sleepover in my attic bedroom of the Front Street house.

“It’ll make your grandmother happy, if you stay over,” Dottie would tell me.

“Just for old times’ sake, dear,” Nana would say.