There was actually a river here, the Los Angeles River, running through the park. But the L.A. River, even the brief stretch of it not encased in concrete, would hardly have passed for a creek in Indiana. She shut down a surge of homesickness so strong it caught her by surprise. “Damn,” she said softly – too soft, apparently, for the kids to hear: no voice piped up from the back, no “Damn what, Mommy?” from Justin and no prim “We don’t use bad words, Mommy,” from Kimberley. She’d thought she was long past yearning for Indiana. What was there to yearn for? Narrow minds and narrower mindsets, freezing cold in the winter and choking humidity in the summer, and thousands of miles to the nearest ocean.

And green. Green grass and bare naked water, and air that didn’t rake the lungs raw.

Just past Hayvenhurst, everything stopped. A red sea of brake lights lay ahead, and she had no way to part it. She glared at the car radio, which hadn’t said a word about any accidents. But the traffic reports seldom bothered with surface-street crashes; they had enough trouble keeping up with bad news on the freeways.

“Why aren’t we going, Mommy?” Kimberley asked from the backseat, as inevitable as the traffic jam.

“We’re stuck,” Nicole answered, as she’d answered a hundred times before. “There must be an accident up ahead.”

They were stuck tight, too. With the park on one side of Victory and a golf course on the other, there weren’t even any cross streets with which to escape. Nothing to do but fume, slide forward a couple of inches, hit the brakes, fume again.

People in the fast lane were making U-turns to go back to Hayvenhurst and around the catastrophe that had turned Victory into defeat. Nicole, of course, was trapped in the slow lane. Whenever she tried to get into the fast lane, somebody cut her off. Drivers leaned on their horns (which the Nicole who’d lived in Indianapolis would have been surprised to hear was rare in L.A.), flipped off their neighbors, shook fists. She wondered how many of them had a gun in waistband or pocket or purse or glove compartment. She didn’t want to find out.