Ernie slouched around, his ham face nearly expressionless, with lips like two leeches lying one on the other. When Annie passed him, he often reached out a hand and let it fall where it might, on her back, her buttocks, or her belly, keeping a dead eye on his wife. The Filipino called her “Miss Annie” and looked up at her from his five feet of self and spoke to her incoherently, when they weren’t too busy, about his thoughts.

Weekends were marathons of exhaustion. Sigrid did the outside car work, and Annie was behind the counter, where there were three rows of customers stacked up, shouting and yelling and laughing, most of them young and rich from Hollywood, movie children, children of the industry. They demanded elaborate concoctions that Annie had to make, mixtures of soda and ice cream and walnuts and whipped cream and sauces and pistachio nuts. The girls were brutally rude to her; the boys flirted and looked at her suggestively past the bright clean hair of their girl friends.

She imagined herself as they saw her, a young waitress who did their bidding with an imperturbable face, sweat stains on her uniform from her exertions for them, a working-class girl, poor, out of bounds. One night, she and Sigrid found mouse turds in the whipped-cream containers. Sigrid laughed but Annie, still shuddering at the memory of her own grisly parasite, threw all the cream out. When Ernie found out about it, he took the little skimp of her skirt in his hand, held it tight across her rear end, and hollered that he’d fire her if she ever threw out anything again without his permission. There was spit on his lips.

One afternoon an actor, famous for his gangster roles, came in and ordered ginger ale. The killer sat there in his silk shirt, a little thin man with graying hair. He gave her a dollar tip. She remembered Tony’s story of the young girl who’d been taken backstage to meet Sarah Bernhardt and when the girl wept with excitement, the great actress took her hand and kissed it and, Tony said, she wouldn’t wash that hand for weeks. The actor’s dollar disappeared into her pocketbook, and she spent it along with the other dollars. Sigrid warned her that Ernie’s wife was working on him to get rid of her. “That dried-up old tit wants you outa here, honey, ‘cause that Okie hick can’t keep his hands off you. Stay out of his way.”