An arm went around her neck. Walter’s face sunk into her neck between shoulder and chin, her sweaty neck. “Annie, Annie,” he muttered, and with his arm around her waist pulled her away from the shed, back into the hot sunlight. They looked at each other for a moment. Four months after and three thousand miles from where they’d first met, she suspected he was already beginning to laugh at her. He was tanned and plumper. She was dazzled by his presence. He took her hand and they walked away from the docks.

“You all right?”

“Fine,” she said.

“Your make-up is running.”

“I got a job. And a room. But it’s not very wonderful.”

“Poor Annie,” he said, and put his head against hers. “Not very wonderful,” he mimicked. “Why don’t you learn to talk straight.”

In a waterfront café, he drank rye with a beer chaser, and ate fried eggs and bacon. She had a meat-loaf sandwich and coffee and thought she’d gone mad with hunger, hardly able to chew for the sheer bliss of filling herself up.

“Tell me…”

She told him about the first part of the ride, the fat man wearing glasses who handed her a book to look at. “Pretty pictures, he said. At first I thought it was about Greek art, all the faces were like statues, you know? But the drawings were bad, and these statues were all doing things to each other.”

“Dirty book…”

“Yes. Then he said he’d show me, and he stopped the car. I got out and ran into the woods. He was too fat to follow me for long. I walked a long way, then came back and sat down on the road …didn’t really know what to do. I was afraid to thumb another ride. But I was saved. A man and a woman stopped and picked me up. The man was very nice really. But the woman wasn’t. She was talking about boring things and trying to make them sound important and acting as if I was not to know what she was talking about. I don’t know why I’m so hungry…”

Walter went up to the bar and returned with another shot glass of rye.

“What am I to do with you?” he asked, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “In one fix, then another.”

“I couldn’t walk to San Diego.”

“A bus?”

“There’s the money.”

“How was the trip out west?”