Homing Read Free Page A

Gilman and settled down in that godforsaken town lost in the barrens of the San Joaquin Valley.
    Karen had listened willingly to her mother's familiar lament of growing old with all her dreams unfulfilled, all her aspirations withered away under the unrelenting glare of a sun that seemed to burn the life from everything it touched.
    Turning her tired face away from the sunlight, Enid had pressed the cashier's check into her daughter's hand. "It's not much, but it should get you started. You go do all the wonderful things I didn't do."
    And Karen had tried.
    She'd found a little apartment in Hollywood, found a job as a waitress, and set about the business of becoming the movie star her mother had always dreamed of her being.
    But it hadn't happened, and Karen-finally moved out of Pleasant Valley-had quickly shed the illusions her mother had in mind for her for the first eighteen years of her life.
    She was pretty, but not nearly beautiful enough to make it on her looks alone. Thousands of girls had hair as dark and luxuriant as hers, eyes as, blue, and figures as good.
    She'd realized within a week of arriving in L.A. that her mother's appraisal of her had been wrong: even if she'd been the prettiest girl in Pleasant Valley, which she doubted, she certainly wasn't going to catch any eyes at the studios. Still, her mother's voice ringing in her mind, she'd enrolled in acting classes, faithfully trudged through the rounds of agents and casting directors, patiently listened to assurances that stardom still loomed just beyond the next corner.
    Two years later, when her father finally died of heart failure while dozing on the porch of the tiny house in Pleasant Valley, her mother had moved to Los Angeles.
    For a while Karen and Enid had lived together. And within a month of Enid's arrival, it became clear to Karen that the dream of stardom was far more important to her mother than to herself.
    When she married Richard Spellman, Karen had been more than happy to give up the struggle. To her mother's unending, undisguised disgust, she'd settled down to have children and make a home for her family.
    "You're going to throw your life away, just like I did," Enid had wailed. "Do you want to end up like me, worn out, with nothing to show for a whole life? You could be a movie star, Karen! Don't waste yourself the way I did!"
    Karen had refused to argue, refused to pay attention to this sad, bitter woman who, Karen now saw, looked far older than her years.
    For more than a decade Karen's life had been almost perfect. First Julie had been born, and six years later Molly came along. Then, five years ago, her whole life had come apart. Richard had been driving her mother home after a long and not-too-unpleasant dinner on the terrace next to their pool. He'd just pulled onto the Ventura Freeway when a drunk driver smashed into his car, killing both Richard and Enid.
    Karen had barely begun to deal with the shock of the two deaths when she discovered that Richard's estate couldn't begin to cover their debts. Within a year she and the girls had been forced to move into a cramped apartment that, tiny as it was, had been barely affordable on what she was able to make by going back to work as a waitress.
    Los Angeles began to grind her down.
    Karen worked hard, fitting classes in with as many shifts in the restaurant as she could manage, and was finally able to leave waiting tables behind her, going to work as a legal secretary in one of the big firms in Century City. But no matter how hard she worked, she couldn't quite get ahead. Rents always went up just as fast as her income, and she never quite managed to get herself and her daughters out of that first cramped apartment they'd moved into after Richard died.
    And every year the streets grew more violent, the traffic more congested, while the schools the girls went to declined.
    The last few years, Karen had been afraid to go anywhere, as the drive-by shootings came steadily closer and the gangs