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beside her, tail wagging. Theo glanced at the nightstand clock. It was 4 am .
    â€œTime for bed?” Theo asked.
    And she turned off the light and got back in bed with Cary Grant.
    The next morning Theo forced herself to get on the road and not entertain the idea of staying one more day at the casino motel. She drove straight to New York, stopping only when absolutely necessary to nap in a rest area. Cary Grant had officially bonded to her and started to lean against her or put her paw on Theo’s leg while she was driving. Theo attributed the progress to the small fortune she’d spent on hot dogs.
    New York looked like she’d imagined it: gridlock, clusters of tall, brick apartment buildings and swatches of colorful bubbled graffiti on passing delivery trucks. She realized, sitting in traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge, that she’d reached her destination and now she didn’t know where to go. This was the moment Olivia had been hounding her about. What would she do when she got to New York? Where would she live? She’d thought Olivia was being a downer or was jealous or hurt by her leaving. Theo had spent so many hours imagining her New York apartment that it had never occurred to her she still needed to find one.
    She imagined the same modest apartment that characters in movies got when they moved to New York to start a new life: a few small rooms with gleaming hardwood floors and a claw-foot tub. A fire escape off the kitchen where she could start a small collection of red geraniums. A humble view of the Brooklyn Bridge. The first exit after the Tappan Zee Bridge she’d buy a Coke, and walk Cary Grant, and find a pay phone to call the one person she knew in New York, an Italian dyke with a dark mop of hair named Sammy.
    The hairball of interlocking parkways and overpasses confused her, and Theo drove for twenty minutes, somehow looping back to where she started. The next time she went a different way, until the clusters of tall apartment buildings disappeared and she found herself driving along lush greenery where tiny bridges fed people off the expressway and into towns that looked stuck in the 1950s. The third time she looped another wrong way and found herself about to pay the toll again at the Tappan Zee Bridge.
    She put her hazards on in the emergency lane and got out and lit a cigarette. If she got a ticket for stopping traffic at least maybe the cop could tell her what direction she needed to go. She lifted Cary Grant out and walked along the gravel shoulder to let her pee. The dog relieved herself then dipped her head to stretch.
    â€œWe’re lost,” she said, and Cary Grant wagged.
    â€œLet’s find a place to live,” she said, loading the dog back in the truck.
    The toll booth employee gave Theo directions to get out of the bad loop, and she followed the signs pointing toward the Bronx. Then she pulled over at the first convenience store she saw.
    â€œProgress,” she said to Cary Grant, who now became excited each time the truck stopped.
    The dog wagged when Theo opened the glove compartment to get out her address book. That’s where she’d stored the hot dogs on the drive across country, but there were no hot dogs left. She opened her phone book and found Sammy’s number under “S” with the words “Sammy Jail.”
    Theo and Sammy had met at a rally protesting the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King. Sammy was visiting San Francisco from New York and hadn’t planned to go to the protest, had just been smoking pot in the park when she got swept up with the other protesters and arrested. During thirty hours of wrongful incarceration they’d become friends. When they were released Sammy had given Theo her number and said, “If you’re ever in New York. . . .”
    Theo hadn’t known if Sammy was trying to flirt with her, but now Theo was in New York with nowhere to live and a pit bull that had been thrown off a