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months on September 23, her fifteenth birthday. Since it fell on a weekend when the Youngs were out of town, she treated herself to a burger, fries and a Coke at Ship’s in Westwood. Everyone else in the big coffee shop was laughing with their companions or deep into a conversation. Alicia, wearing her new red mini and five-inch red heels, felt even more miserably lonely than she did on the job. Quite apart from this devastating loneliness, Alicia missed Juanita in a manner so deep it was a constant, arthritic ache in her bones. Most nights she cried herself to sleep.
    When the tall, skinny, redheaded man sitting next to her smiled, she smiled back. He had a class look, and she decided, correctly it soon turned out, that he was a college man from nearby UCLA. She pursed her lips around the straw.
    “You don’t look like you’re enjoying that hamburger,” he said.
    She glanced down at the almost untouched bun.
    “I guess I don’t have much appetite today,” she said, discarding the Spanish intonations she put on with the Youngs.
    “But the food here’s terrific.”
    “For hamburgers,” he said authoritatively, “Tommy’s is the tops.”
    “Tommy’s?”
    “You’ve never been there?”
    “I’ve only been in LA two months,” she admitted softly.
    “Where are you from?”
    After a long moment, she said, “El Paso.” She had been reading about Texas in the National Geographic, which the following month would be in Dr. Young’s waiting room.
    “I’m Barry Cordiner,” he said.
    Another slight pause, and then she said, “Alicia Lopez.”
    Intuitively she accepted that disclosing the truth of her childhood would prompt him to pick up his check and leave her to her icy loneliness. Besides, hadn’t she left Alice Hollister and the sickening smells of over-ripe crops far behind? Besides, she already liked this college man with the freckles and curly red hair.
    He took her to see Room at the Top at the Bruin. He arranged to dine with her on chili-burgers at Tommy’s the following night, which she had off since the Youngs were away. When he kissed her goodnight, she felt all warm and happy. Was this love?
    On her wedding night she lay awake, the lusty whir of the air conditioner drowning out the gentle, regular breathing of her sleeping spouse. She knew she should feel guilty and rotten about deceiving him—but what choice had there been? He had led her from that awful, lonely pit, and she could not risk being thrust back there.
    I’ll make it up to him, she thought lovingly as she touched his bony ankle with her toe. She had already considered him immensely rich and knowledgeable, an “almost” lawyer who wrote wonderful stories, a creature so far superior to her that it was impossible to ever bridge the gap. And today she had learned that his family owned Magnum Pictures! Magnum, where they made so many of those double bills she’d seen in fleabag theaters.
    Thinking of his sister and cousins, she sighed. Only that large blond one, Hap he was called, had looked at her with any degree of warmth.
    The others had been snooty and superior. Hap, she thought. What a funny name.
    Then she reached her arms around Barry’s thin body. His even breathing continued.
    You’ll never be sorry you married me, she thought fiercely. / promise that you’ll never be sorry.
    Alicia Cordiner was making a sacred vow. She was giving her husband her loyalty, which was boundless.
    As Barry turned onto his mist-shrouded block, a jet roared overhead.
    This tract of modest bungalows, identical except for their gingerbread and clapboard trim, lay directly on the flight path into Los Angeles Airport.
     
    He pulled into his driveway, parking behind his father’s eleven N
    year-old Onyx sedan. Alicia slipped her comb in her purse. When they had entered the Los Angeles sprawl, she had turned on the interior lights and ever since had been combing and recombing her hair, wiping away pale lipstick to reapply it, attempting to