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into Georgia, the state where they had finally left the winter behind. The car was a rolling oven. They had all the windows open; air rushed in with a deafening roar but no cooling properties. This was the second day of their trip south from New York to Dania, Florida. Their mother had pulled them out of school for her three-week gig singing and dancing with Ray Bolger in a high-season dinner theater production of
Anything Goes.
    “Bolger’s a genius. His feet are little geniuses in shoes. He came out of retirement to do this show. It’s a real break for me,” she had told them as she packed their small suitcases. “Something that could lead to something bigger.”
    She let Nora and Harold in on all her career plans and worries. She was thirty-eight, getting old for musicals, plus she now had the two of them to think about, and with their father on the road so much of the time, he couldn’t be as much of a help as he might be. Opportunity wasn’t knocking as often as it used to, and when it did, she sometimes couldn’t even get to the door. She was determined not to let this particular knock go unanswered.
    Nora wished she wasn’t stuck in the back with Harold. She longed to be up front next to her mother, who drove in a speedy, freewheeling way. In the passenger seat, Nora could pretend she herself was doing the driving.
    Lynette paid little attention to them and their back-seat squabbling. She kept the radio turned up; one speaker was on its way out and quavered under the strain of Dionne Warwick singing “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” from the dashboard. Lynette picked stations that didn’t play rock and roll, which she eyed with suspicion. She was in a trance, locked into this song, plugged into the current that Dionne was sending through the airwaves. Lynette was syncopated with the road—wheel in one hand, cigarette in the other, a covered cup of coffee jiggling on the dash, both the mottled tan filter and the coffee lid greased coral with her lip-print. She had the radio and the road and her mission, to get them to Dania and the Sand Bar Motor Hotel and Dinner Theater by tomorrow afternoon.
    “Palm tree!” Harold shouted. “We’re there!” But it was a suppressed shout. He understood that everyone was enormously tired of him at the moment. He had been announcing their arrival since they hit Maryland.
    “No,” Lynette said, holding a map over the top of the back seat. “See. We still have almost the whole length of Florida to go.”
    “Oh,” he said, then grew deeply silent, his narrow chest rising and falling under the skimpy plastic lei he had been wearing since their stop yesterday at the Aloha Juice Stand, a Hawaiian outpost in North Carolina.
    “We’ll stop soon,” she promised. “Start looking for a motel. Start looking for VACANCY . A little vacancy is what we need.”
     
    Art—Lynette’s husband, Nora and Harold’s father—was in Las Vegas, managing Vicki Ashford, “The Purring Kitten,” a singer with long blond hair that fell over one eye and a husky voice (“Stop by Some Night, Late” was her current big hit, number twenty-seven on the
Billboard
charts). Vicki was like a kitten onstage, but behind her back Art referred to her as “The Shrieking Jackal.” Art had managed Vicki for two years, and her career was beginning to skyrocket, but the more famous she got, the more demands she came up with, and the more she drank. And the more she drank, the more she demanded. Demands for her dressing room (champagne on ice, Hershey’s Kisses in a crystal bowl) and wardrobe and special lighting and photo approval and musical arrangements, and of course, always for more money. Keeping Vicki happy was hard, highly acidic work; Art stashed a bottle of chalky white liquid antacid in the pocket of his suit coat, and often had a white mustache from swigging it through a long day of Vicki.
    That night, at the motel where they’d found some vacancy, on the beige phone on the nightstand