From high atop the city Anne leans against the window. The gray sky is smoggy and is below her and even from twenty-seven stories up she can clearly see the busy streets below. The cars and people like little bugs rushing this way and that.

Los Angeles City Hall is the tallest building in L.A. At thirty-two stories it surpasses the United Artists building with its thirteen floors. Anne has always been rather fascinated with architecture. She remembers being a little girl in New York and being in awe of the Manhattan skyline. She can feel the warmth of an unseen sun through the glass. Her head begins to feel light and she takes a step back. She had gotten distracted from her purpose of being on the observation deck to begin with and was loath to be caught lollygagging.

Anne had been working for the Los Angeles City Council for the past three years. It was a rather thankless job but it paid the bills. She lived very modestly in the same home in Echo Park that she’d lived in since Rose. She went about her day making coffee, setting appointments, dictating letters, taking calls, pretending not to notice the looks she got from the visiting men in their blue business suits and long skinny ties. Ignoring the appraisals and lingering eyes and the offers of dinner and drinks at the new club on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood called Whiskey a Go-Go.

She spent much of her time with her daughter Rose who was ten and who had just been moved up through the fourth grade.  Apparently the pace in Whittier Elementary was simply too slow for her. Or so her teachers stated. Anne was of two minds. She was proud of her daughter’s dedication and desire for learning but she also worried about her. She was a quiet child who spent much of her time reading and writing stories in her ramshackle treehouse in their backyard.

Anne worked long hours at the Council offices and there were many evenings Rose ate alone. Well, alone but with old Mrs. Figg next door checking in on her from time to time. “These were dangerous times”, old Mrs. Figg would intone. And she was not wrong. Had it not been just last year that their President Jack Kennedy had been killed? Riding in a car in Dallas with his wife.

Anne remembers the day well. It was November and she was cold! She had been on the floor, under her desk, praying no one walked in on the sight of her little dairraire under her black pencil skirt pushed up over her knees. She dropped an entire file of property tax documents and letters and they’d fallen in all directions in a whoosh of paper. With a groan she had gotten to her knees with some difficulty. Her skirt was snug and she felt extremely conspicuous.

The small radio was on at her desk and the jaunty sounds of Martha and the Vandellas playing on KNX radio when suddenly it simply stopped and the DJ’s voice almost drowned out by a long scratch. There had been a shooting in Dallas. Anne had known the President was to be in Dallas and she stopped to listen still crouched on the floor. What was being announced made her heart jump into her throat. The President of the United States had just been assassinated. 

Next Chapter: Lyllian, June 2017, Seattle