Chapter Eight
“Look up her ad in The Trade,” Jessica Roth had said before she escorted me into the waiting hands of her secretary. So still dressed like yesterday, and since Penny was away until the weekend in some secret place she wouldn’t divulge, and before I stopped home for whatever lay ahead with my mother, I looked.
Cheap Books at City Mall sold girly magazines, newspapers, paperbacks, tobacco products, and sundries. Positioned beside Pasqual’s Pizza Parlor, its owner John Peckerwood came to dinner at our house sometimes before he and Father fell out and he played board games with me while Mom puttered in the kitchen. Mr. Peckerwood had flown fighter jets in Viet Nam where dad served as his crew chief. Never married, instead of dinner at our house, he ate dinner at Pasqual’s and w
