headed home from the beach neighborhoods, a funny name for the cleaning women since most of them were illegals. They carried plastic bags of the supplies they preferred, pungent disinfectants, Day-Glo green. Since it was the end of the day, they didn’t talk to each other.

Rosemary Danko was in the sideways seat behind the driver. Jimmy sat in the last row, against the window. When she’d sat down, one of the cleaning women moved away. Rosemary knew Jimmy was there, had turned to see him at a stop where a man with no shirt had gotten off the bus. She had looked right at him. He thought for a second she was going to lift her hand to wave.

The bus took her all the way into Garden Grove, a twenty-minute trip straight east on Westminster. Away from the water, it got hotter by the mile. Jimmy could feel it coming through the glass of the closed window. Inland, it hadn’t gotten any cooler when the sun went down. It was another reason the women didn’t talk.

She got off at a big cross street and walked north two blocks and then over a block. When she passed through a section with the streetlight shot out or burned out, she quickened her pace.

It was a ground-flo or unit in a building of ten apartments. She knocked at the door and waited for almost a minute before she knocked again. Then, impatient, sighing, she took the key from the black mailbox beside the door. She wiped her feet on the mat.

Estella Danko had died fourteen months ago.

Jimmy stood in the dining room at the round white Formica table and went through the mostly unopened mail. She had died somewhere out of the house. She had died suddenly. There were quarterly dunning letters from a nursing home but Estella Danko hadn’t died there. She had worked as a nurse and had left without turning in her uniforms. Died inconsider ately, without giving them notice.

There were government letters referring to Rosemary. She was on disability. Her utilities for the apartment were being paid direct by some agency. With the death of her mother, she’d gotten a bigger check. She had been an L.A. Unified School District teacher, ninth and tenth grade math, a school in Diamond Bar. Her middle name was Marialinda. Rosemary Marialinda Danko.

Jimmy looked in on her. She had gone straight into one of the bedrooms, her mother’s bedroom. She was watching television, sitting on the end of the stripped mattress. It was one of those dating shows. She looked over at Jimmy, waved him away.

In the living room he found a cabinet full of old pictures, the next best thing to living witnesses. He turned on a floor lamp and pulled it closer and sat on the end of the coffee table. There were boxes of photos, loose and in leather albums. The Dankos liked cameras.

There had just been the three of them. They’d had a house somewhere for most of the time, had lived in other apartments in the early years after a wedding in what looked like Rosarito Beach, down over the border on the way to Ensenada. Estella was Mexican. She had been a beauty but she was the size of a child.

Every picture except the wedding had the baby in it. And then the baby grew. There was one of Rosemary at four or five on a pony at the rides in Griffith Park, her smiling father sitting on the rail as she passed behind him staring straight ahead, a scared look on her little face.

Jimmy slipped it into the pocket of his shirt.

Almost every other picture of Danko had him beside one plane or another. There was a framed photo in fading colors of a four-place Cessna, red over white, Danko standing with his hand on the tip of the wing, the world headquarters of the Danko “Flying School” in half-focus in the background.

“Dancing Queen” was painted on the engine cowling.

Jimmy took that one, too.

And he found the picture of Estella Danko to take. It was from an open-air bar somewhere, sand on the floor and the beach in the background, probably down in Baja. Three blond girls, probably college kids, more pretty people, were grouped behind Bill Danko who sat on a silver beer keg, his legs open, wearing shorts and hurraches, his elbows on his knees, aviator glasses, a big grin on his face, a bottle of beer in his hand. Estella was off to