She burst out laughing, and Sigrid said, “Jesus! You scared me!” and Annie said, “Only a thought, an old joke.”

“Tell me, I wanna laugh too,” Sigrid demanded. So Annie told her an old grammar-school series of jokes that had to do with book titles—The Halt in the Desert, by Mustapha Pee…And Sigrid shrieked with laughter.

It would be fine to travel on forever like this, safe in the car, carrying in the trunk a rag or two to throw on one’s back, plenty of cigarettes in the side pockets. But a large sign announcing the imminence of Laguna Beach dispelled the snugness. A touch of dread, familiar as morning light, made Annie’s hands tighten on the wheel.

The village lay still beneath the midday sun. With wary eyes, Annie took in the expensive-looking small shops that lined the ocean side of the road. On the left, up in the hills, the blood-red roof tiles of estates hung like awnings among the brilliant leaves of the trees.

“There’s the drive-in,” Sigrid announced, pointing to a circular building on the ocean cliff. One car was parked on the asphalt apron, a tray clamped onto the driver’s window, a crumpled paper napkin on the tray.

Less than a mile farther on, Sigrid shouted, “Here! Turn here!”

They drove up a crushed-shell-covered road to an innocuous little house that might have once been the servants’ quarters of a large estate. Flowers climbed along the outer walls, one thick vine followed the rail of the stairs that led to an upper floor. As Annie parked, Sigrid’s brother, his white shirt sleeves rolled up, opened the narrow door on the ground floor and stood blinking there in the sunlight, stretching and rubbing his face.

He was a slender boy of about twenty and he looked less like Sigrid’s brother than a son she might have thrown off in an earlier, more innocent time when her hair had been the same light-brown color as his. Sigrid leaped upon him, and Annie had a sudden picture of Sigrid love-making, awkward, bumpy, an inept farmer girl, cows thumping in barns, smells of clover and sweat and dung.

They went to work the next day. Ernie Cotts was from Oklahoma and he intended to make his fortune out of the drive-in. His pale, flat-chested wife did the books on a cleared table in the back of the kitchen, sitting there like a weed, her face wrinkled in distaste among the thick smells of fry cookery. A Filipino, erect as a toy soldier, his apron unaccountably clean, bowed to Annie whenever she looked in his direction. The cook, an old navy man, sometimes wore his false teeth. On days when his face was symmetrical, he was sober and occasionally made a sour joke. When his teeth were out and his mouth caved in, he was bound to be full of gin and given to violent rages, smacking the grill with the long-handled spatula as though he would murder it, grabbing off orders from the wheel that hung between kitchen and counter, and cursing at what he read as he seized the French-fry basket to shake out portions.