street, standing in the road and looking furious. A trash can had slid down the hill in the quake and capsized, toppling its contents on the path to her front door. Using a pink house slipper, Dolores palpated a Hefty bag that had ejected coffee grounds on her arid lawn.
“You see!” Dolores exclaimed, pointing a cigarette at a scattering of blackened banana peels and a decapitated American Girl doll. She looked up at Claudia and shook with indignation. “Your garbage, my house!”
Dolores had lived here forever, a stubborn holdout against the forces of change. Her house perched on the upward slope of the hill, a thickly stuccoed box whose strip of front yard had been paved with a forest of faded plastic pinwheels and toppled garden gnomes. Dolores did not strike Claudia as a garden gnome type, let alone a whimsical pinwheel sort of person. Tremendous in both age and girth, Dolores most closely resembled a landslide: wobbly jaw, pendulous breasts, a vast rear end pitted with fathomless craters, all that craggy flesh descending downward, downward, ultimately settling at the veined and purple ankles that Dolores squeezed into flesh-toned support hose.
“It’s not our trash, Mrs. Hernandez,” she said politely. She prodded at the doll with the toe of her sandal. “I think it might belong to the Olsons. We don’t have kids, remember?”
This didn’t satisfy Dolores. She put a hand on one mountainous hip and took a drag of her cigarette, her crevassed lips pursing tightly around the butt, her livery jaw ripping from the effort of inhaling. “You clean mess,” she said. “No es mi problemo. Estoy demasiado viejo.” Her eyes went hazy, and she blinked quickly, as if suppressing decades of pent-up emotion.
“I’m really very sorry,” Claudia began, and then stopped, annoyed that she’d somehow been intimidated into an unwarranted apology. Claudia was always considerate of Dolores, even if she had to force herself. She made sure to wave at Dolores when she passed her in the street, she pushed holiday cards into her mail slot at Christmas, she even sometimes picked up the free Mount Washington Monthly from her driveway and delivered it right to her stoop so the old lady wouldn’t have to walk too far. She and Jeremy never threw wild parties or had screaming fights. Maybe they did represent a change to the neighborhood that Dolores resented, but surely she could look beyond that and realize that they were really very nice people? What was it going to take to get a little civility from her? Did no one have manners anymore? That was one thing you could say about growing up in Mantanka, Wisconsin, in the heart of the genial Midwest, people were at least polite and responsive to friends and strangers alike, often to a fault, ready to cede their spot on the rescue boat in order to maintain overall peace on the Titanic. Here, in Los Angeles, each person was a war-ready fortress, cut off from the world by a moat of self-preservation. Even after almost a decade in this city, Claudia was still shocked sometimes when people blithely pushed in front of her in line at the movies, at their ability to pretend they hadn’t just stepped on her toe in order to procure a better seat.
“I’ll be happy to take care of it for you later,” she said to Dolores. It seemed the kind of thing you should do for an elderly woman, even if you didn’t particularly like her—just commonsense good manners. “But first I have to clean up my own house.”
Dolores grunted and took another drag from her cigarette, tapping the ash on Claudia’s shoe. Her wig slipped sideways on her head, revealing an inch of thinning scalp above her ear. Holding the cigarette between index and middle finger, she cocked her hand like a gun and pointed it at Claudia. “You!” she said, suddenly changing the subject. “Husband make noise! Terrible terrible music. Too loud I call police!”
“I’ll tell him to play more quietly,” said Claudia, backing away. Purple shadows were creeping up the canyon as the sun dipped behind the hills. It was growing late; they would need to leave soon if they were going to beat the traffic into town. “I’m very sorry, but I have to go now.”
As she fled, Dolores traced her path with her cigarette. “Espero que el terremoto les asuste a todos,” Claudia heard her muttering, “y que me dejen en paz.”
Entering through the front door, Claudia heard Jeremy swearing