years ago; each one more decrepit than the last, each more astonishing in the audacity of its listing price. Even for $600,000 their options had been severely limited—the first real estate agent they met had groaned when she heard their budget—and they were forced to creep farther and farther away from the center of Los Angeles to find anything within their price range. They’d looked here, in the isolated hills of Mount Washington, only reluctantly—Jeremy had worried that it was too far from a decent bar and restaurant, not even a grocery store within a ten-minute drive—but as soon as she walked inside, Claudia had known it would be their home. It was just like the ad had said:
Cozy two-bedroom bungalow nestled in a picturesque setting w/stunning canyon views. Warm wood floors, fireplace, big windows & a glass slider to breezy decks.
So what if those two bedrooms were squeezed into twelve hundred square feet, and the glass slider was an addition from a dubious seventies remodel and didn’t belong in a postwar cottage at all, and the exterior of the house had been painted a hideous shade of lavender? The house had claimed them as its own, seduced them so thoroughly with its coved ceilings and sweeping vistas from the master bedroom and built-in bookshelves that they hadn’t even had to speak to each other at all, hadn’t had to exchange any meaningful looks behind the real agent’s back during the tour—they’d just known. This was the house from which they would be launching the rest of their lives: their artistic careers, their two-month-old marriage, their family. They’d put in a bid before the end of the day.
It was a marvel that they could afford the cottage at all: They’d had to go over their budget to outbid eleven other potential owners. But it was 2005, and mortgages were cheap and plentiful. Their broker didn’t blink once when he looked at their income statements and saw a barely employed musician and an aspiring film director who had the ten percent necessary for a down payment only because of Jeremy’s meager inheritance. Still, even with an ARM interest-only loan, they blew through Jeremy’s inheritance within twenty months, began living on credit cards, and were saved just in time by a second financial windfall when Claudia sold her film at Sundance last January. That money was vanishing quickly, too. But soon the struggles would end altogether: Jeremy’s new band’s album was nearly done, and the payday that Claudia’s agent had negotiated for her next film was so staggering—mid-six figures!—as to make their mortgage payments seem negligible.
Claudia swept the shards of glass up with a broom and carried the dustpan out the kitchen door to the garbage bins in the driveway. There she stood looking past the tangle of sage scrub and chaparral at the houses that cascaded down the mountain: a mix of ramshackle cottages with stained-glass baubles hanging in the windows that suggested Mount Washington’s recent bohemian past and newly remodeled modernist behemoths that pointed to its more bourgeois future. Once, this neighborhood had been a stronghold of middle-class Mexican-American families, but the onslaught of gentrification was bringing a swift end to all that. These days, the token minorities tilted more toward Filipino and Korean; the primary evidence of the Spanish-speaking population that had gravitated toward the bottom of the hill was the norteño music that occasionally drifted up from the lowland parks. Even in the short time Jeremy and Claudia had lived in Mount Washington, the neighborhood had visibly changed. The ancient sculptor at the top of the street who fed the feral cats had died, and his peeling mid-century home had been reimagined by the new owner—a music producer who drove a BMW—as a three-story contemporary with water features. Next door to him, in a remodeled Craftsman that until recently had held a friendly Mexican family with six grown kids, lived a forty-ish couple who seemed to have two of everything: matching Priuses, matching twin babies, matching stainless commuter coffee mugs that they carried to their matching movie-industry jobs each day.
She turned around to see Dale, the gay violinist from two houses up, assessing the damage to his home. “You guys make it through OK?” she called up to him.
“Cracked foundation, I think. Looks like the house dropped an inch. Know a good contractor?” He looked past Claudia and then grimaced, disappearing back through a stand of sycamores. Claudia turned to see Dolores Hernandez, her neighbor from across the