“That crazy woman May Landower—she was drunk all the way. We had a flat tire in Arizona in the middle of the desert. She got out on the road and started to pray, on her knees, in the middle of the road. In Virginia, she said we had to go look at a natural bridge, it was in the cards that morning. There weren’t any people there in the park, and she began screaming we were in mortal danger. Once, in a store where we’d stopped to get cigarettes, there was a woman with hair growing all over her face. After that, she talked about nothing but the menopause, said I’d look like that someday, then I’d see what life was. She had a little aspirin box she kept pills in, said they were ground up monkey glands and did her a world of good. The only nice thing was the man we picked up just before we got to the Rockies. He was a tall old man with red hair, a cook at a CCC camp, and his wife was having a baby in some little town on the other side of the mountains. So he drove us. It was night. It was such a narrow road. There was fog sometimes. You could see, way down, the lights of maybe one other car. He drove like the wind. He was so worried about his wife. She was just a girl, he said. And we got to this little town, in the middle of the mountains. There was one hotel, and he left us there and ran down the middle of the street to the hospital. It was three in the morning. They gave us some white bread to eat, we were so hungry. She’d been drinking out of her bottle all the time he was driving, saying, ‘My, it’s nice to have a man to drive, isn’t it, Annie? My, my!’”

He sat absolutely still, his eyes never moving from her face. She began to eat the toast he’d left on his plate.

“And then?” he asked. She felt she’d won a victory of some kind. He wanted to hear more.

“That night, drunk as she was, she consulted the Ouija board. It spelled tears. She said sorrow was in store. I said it meant we’d have another flat. Oh, it was terrible, terrible! That’s why I had to get out away from her. In Hollywood, she wasn’t just crazy; she said I was too, everybody was.”

“How did you get my letters after you moved out?”

“There’s a man, Johnnie Bliss. Somebody she used to know. He’s been bringing them to me.”

“Just the letters?”

“He doesn’t like women.”

“A pansy?”

She didn’t answer. “What kind of job?” he asked.

“Stock girl. In a store in Los Angeles. They sell dresses, women’s things.”

“How much?”

“About fourteen dollars.”

“About?”