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San Mateo, California, was suffocating under a coat of brownish-purple smog. On the Bayshore Freeway, traffic crawled, stopped, then crawled slowly forward another fifty feet before stopping again. Horns honked. Tempers were short.
Grace Hope was aware of neither the sweltering heat nor the traffic delay. She barely listened to Judi Sprague’s monologue; besides, she already knew it by heart. Judi’s favorite topic was men. As far as that went, that was all Judi lived for: Men!
“Well,” Judi was saying in her Bronx accent as she fluffed up her hair and gazed coquettishly at the young man in the Mustang next to her car, “I told him it was no go. I mean … who did he think he was? What did he think I was? Some common street girl? So I told him, ‘See here, Bill Hill. I don’t care if you are the Sales Manager. I’ll thank you to keep your sweaty little hands to yourself.’ So he started simpering and playing Mister Nice Guy and says I have him all wrong, that he didn’t mean to imply I would go to bed with him. ‘All I want,’ says he, ‘is a female companion for the weekend at Tahoe … someone to dance with, gamble with, walk along the beach with,’ So I says right back, ‘Well, why didn’t you say so. Ah … where is it that you plan to stay at Tahoe?’ He mentions some cheap cruddy flea-trap motel, and I says ‘You’d never catch me dead in that cruddy dump. How about King’s Castle. He kinda goes white around the gills and I can see him thinking it’s going to cost him thirty bucks a day. Finally he says he’ll get reservations. So … the weekend isn’t shot anyway.” Judi braked suddenly, viciously honked her horn, and swore at a woman who had abruptly switched lanes in front of her. She turned to Grace and asked, “What you doing this weekend, honey?”
Fictional reading for entertainment purposes only.