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had, well into her nineties.
    “At least let me enjoy my last days on this earth. Hollywood.” She stared dreamily into the distance, possibly picturing movie stars and red carpets, limousines and premieres. “I think I’ve always belonged there.”
    “Did you ever want to act?” It was embarrassing, but I’d never considered what my grandmother might have really wanted tobe, besides a housewife, then a mother and a furniture saleswoman, and then the one who took care of me.
    She gave a little pfft through pursed lips and a single, dismissive shake of her head. “That wasn’t an option.”
    “Why not?”
    She was looking at me as if I’d asked why she hadn’t spent her young adulthood growing a second head. “It just wasn’t something you did. And I had to help my parents. And there was Miltie, of course.” Her face softened, the way it always did when she mentioned her baby brother, ten years younger than she was, the one she’d helped raise while her own mother had worked as a cashier in a candy store. “Maybe we could stop and see him on the way.”
    I had a temp job in a Boston law firm that had started two weeks after I’d graduated, a summer position that stretched into fall. Grandma gave notice at the furniture store, and together, we began the process of picking through fifteen years’ worth of possessions: the things my parents had bought, the things Grandma had shipped from Florida, the boxes of old clothes, report cards, and elementary-school art projects, rugs and dishes and pots and pans and hundreds of books. We held a tag sale at the end of September, and spent the following weekends driving trash bags and boxes to Goodwill and the Salvation Army, until the two-bedroom house stood almost empty, with a FOR SALE sign staked in the front yard.
    We started our trip just before Thanksgiving, thinking we would meander our way across the country and arrive in Los Angeles the second week of December. I’d found us a short-term furnished rental in what the Internet had assured me was a safe part of West Hollywood, a one-bedroom apartment with a couch in the living room, a full kitchen, and easy access to the 101, the highway that would take me to the Valley. In a crate in the back of Grandma’s Cadillac were printed stacks of myrésumé and writing samples, the Golden Girls and Friends spec scripts I’d written, and a garment bag with two interview outfits that I’d bought at Filene’s Basement. There was a navy-blue blazer with pants and a matching skirt, the short-sleeved sweaters I’d wear underneath, and the strand of pearls that had been Grandma’s wedding gift to her daughter and were now mine.
    We stayed at affordable places on the way, stopping off to see Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and Milt, now well into his seventies, who lived in a condominium in Cleveland and left all three of his television sets on all day long, volume blaring, tuned to ESPN. We spent a single night in Vegas, where I treated us to tickets to see Bette Midler and a meal at a restaurant with actual Picassos on the wall. The next day we were in Los Angeles, where we stayed, at Grandma’s insistence, at the Regent Beverly Wilshire—“the Pretty Woman hotel!”—for our first three nights in California, at a rate Grandma had bargained for after presenting the bemused clerk with her AAA card and her AARP card and, I suspected, the story of what had happened to my face, while I was out in the cobblestone driveway collecting our luggage (I had managed the trip with a single nylon duffel, while my grandmother had two vintage Louis Vuitton suitcases, a trunk, a hatbox, and three zippered garment bags). “One room,” I’d told her, holding up my index finger for emphasis, before leaving her at the front desk. By the time I returned, Grandma was beaming, with the key card in her hand and a bellman waiting with a wheeled cart behind her.
    We took the elevator up to the sixth floor of the Wilshire wing. The manager had