Gil was actually somewhat miffed that Penny hadn’t told him where she was going. Presumably off with her boyfriend, but Gil didn’t know where he lived. He suspected she had left a forwarding address with the post office, but she could have left one with him, too. After all, he had been friendly to her. He liked renting to good-looking girls. He tried to be nice to them and respond to their requests about maintenance quickly. Pretty girls were used to being catered to. He was sure Penny had already forgotten him.

At least, plants didn’t treat you like dirt. He would go work in his garden.

Penny hummed to herself as she finished putting her clothes into the one small suitcase that Gary had allotted her for their trip. She was in the roomy, two-bedroom apartment Gary shared with a man named Steve. It sat on a small hill in Monterey Park. On a clear day you could see the long outline of Catalina Island from its balcony. At the moment, it was too smoggy to see much of anything.

A 1962 Volkswagen Beetle wasn’t very large, and they had camping equipment, so one suitcase was all she could take. She didn’t care, though. She would go without any clothes if necessary-and that’s the way Gary preferred her.

She grinned when she realized what song she was humming. “Dream,” made famous by the Everly Brothers a few years ago. That had been “our song,” the song she had shared with her boyfriend in school. Actually, with her boyfriends-and there had been many of them. With the same song for all, at least she never forgot what it was.

She didn’t play games like that with Gary. He was different. Different than the four men who had proposed to her in the two years she’d been in California. One had expected her to accept the virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus. She had laughed at him. Another said he pictured her wearing white gloves. She’d been forced to wear white gloves in her college dining hall, but this was the real world. She told him what he could do with his white gloves.