Honeymoon for Three

Alfred’s face.
    ***
    Gil couldn’t help the man with the beard who claimed to be Penny’s cousin, because Penny hadn’t told him where she was going. Even if she had, he might not have passed on the information. Something was fishy about the guy. Starting with the fact that Penny had just vacated the apartment yesterday afternoon. How did he know that Penny had moved out? Even if he’d knocked on her door, the fact of her not being there would certainly not be evidence of that.
    Gil was actually somewhat miffed that Penny hadn’t told him where she was going. Presumably off with her boyfriend, but Gil didn’t know where he lived. He suspected she had left a forwarding address with the post office, but she could have left one with him, too. After all, he had been friendly to her. He liked renting to good-looking girls. He tried to be nice to them and respond to their requests about maintenance quickly. Pretty girls were used to being catered to. He was sure Penny had already forgotten him.
    At least, plants didn’t treat you like dirt. He would go work in his garden.
    ***
    Penny hummed to herself as she finished putting her clothes into the one small suitcase that Gary had allotted her for their trip. She was in the roomy, two-bedroom apartment Gary shared with a man named Steve. It sat on a small hill in Monterey Park. On a clear day you could see the long outline of Catalina Island from its balcony. At the moment, it was too smoggy to see much of anything.
    A 1962 Volkswagen Beetle wasn’t very large, and they had camping equipment, so one suitcase was all she could take. She didn’t care, though. She would go without any clothes if necessary—and that’s the way Gary preferred her.
    She grinned when she realized what song she was humming. “Dream,” made famous by the Everly Brothers a few years ago. That had been “our song,” the song she had shared with her boyfriend in school. Actually, with her boyfriends—and there had been many of them. With the same song for all, at least she never forgot what it was.
    She didn’t play games like that with Gary. He was different. Different than the four men who had proposed to her in the two years she’d been in California. One had expected her to accept the virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus. She had laughed at him. Another said he pictured her wearing white gloves. She’d been forced to wear white gloves in her college dining hall, but this was the real world. She told him what he could do with his white gloves.
    Penny knelt on the suitcase with her full weight to force it shut and then latched it. The only piece of clothing she hadn’t put into it was her wedding dress. She would hang that up inside the car to keep it from getting wrinkled. When she’d been home for her summer visit, she’d spent a day with her brother and his wife. At some point, when talking about Gary, she’d casually mentioned that they might be getting married.
    “Do you have a wedding dress?” Barbara asked.
    “I have a new blue dress that Gary hasn’t seen.”
    Tim and Barbara hit the roof at the idea of a blue wedding dress. They rushed her out to a department store. Penny found a white, knee-length dress that fit her perfectly. Tim plunked a white hat on her head. So she returned to Los Angeles with a wedding dress in tow. In spite of that, she hadn’t quite believed she was going to get married, but apparently she was.
    Penny had finished vacating her apartment yesterday. She had brought the last of her stuff here, and now it lay scattered around the spacious living room. She reached into a box containing some letters and lifted out a brown envelope. She hesitated, wondering whether she should throw it in the trash, but then she fished two wrinkled pieces of note paper out of it.
    She placed them flat on the coffee table and smoothed them as much as she could. Both pieces had the name and address of a Las Vegas motel at the top. Not one of the big hotels. Just a rinky-dink motel Penny had never heard of. The messages on them were written in pencil. The handwriting was large and messy, as if a right-handed person had written them with his left hand or vice versa.
    The notes had been slid under the door to her apartment, one in late July and one just two weeks ago, in August. The first message read, “Don’t stick to one boyfriend. Play the field.” Penny had thought it was a prank note from one of the other tenants. She had shown it to her landlord and