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escrow closed, they bulldozed the lot.”
    “Maybe the bungalow owner has a special bullshit detector,” I said.
    “You know what I like about you, April? You don’t have a cynical bone in your body.”
    As if to prove Vanessa’s point, I immediately called an editor at Metropolitan Home. Without even developing a story pitch, I just picked up the phone and dialed. “There’s a house in L.A. being sold by a widow in a contest,” I said. “It’s an old beach bungalow worth several million dollars. All she wants is three hundred thousand dollars from the right buyer. A buyer with the right soul. It’s a great feature story.”
    “Californians are seriously strange about their real estate,” she said.
    “ Quirky was the word I was thinking of.”
    “Too quirky for us.”
    “It’s got great visuals,” I said. “It’s a perfectly preserved early Craftsman bungalow standing all alone on a street of McMansions. There are fruit trees all over the yard.”
    “Try This Old House. Or Sunset. ”
    “ Sunset will probably want to scout my house. They’d love the glass wall concept. They’re not going to do an old beach bungalow.”
    “And neither are we,” she said. “But we’re doing a series on the most popular household items of all time. We need someone to talk to Chuck Williams. You interested?”
    “You’re talking about the Williams-Sonoma Chuck Williams?”
    “He’s eighty-seven. We need eight hundred words.”
    “What’s the deadline?”
    “First week of January.”
    “Sure,” I said, because it’s what I always said to keep myself in business, “I can do it.”
    I drove to the Williams-Sonoma in the mall on the hill in order to soak up the atmosphere. I somehow ignored the fact that it was a week before Christmas and the atmosphere would be chaos. Even in the parking lot I could see the fierce looks on the drivers’ faces, the tense set of their jaws. After three trips around the lot, trolling for a spot, I caught the eye of a mom with two young kids in a stroller. She nodded her head toward the next lane over, and I sped around, stopped in the middle of the lane, flipped on my turn signal and waited to claim the spot as my own. I waited ten minutes while the mom opened her minivan and buckled in first one kid, then another. She came around to the back and folded up her stroller, then hoisted it inside. Finally, she got in her seat, buckled up and backed out. I began to move toward the spot, when a man in a silver BMW zipped up from the other side, flew around the minivan and skidded into the empty spot. I pulled up directly behind him and leaned on my horn.
    “What?” he asked, leaning out of his car as if he’d done nothing wrong.
    “No way,” I said. “There is no way. That’s my spot.”
    “Says who?”
    “Don’t be a jerk,” I said. “It’s Christmas.”
    He got back in his car, backed out and vacated the spot. “Merry fucking Christmas,” he yelled, as he drove away. I pulled in and turned off the car. I was shaking. A few weeks before, someone had been shot in a mall parking lot. Someone’s grandmother. She’d come back to her car, her arms full of bags from Nordstrom, and someone came right up and shot her for the money in her purse. Why had I thought I would be immune?
    The front windows of Williams-Sonoma displayed KitchenAid mixers in red, yellow, pumpkin and sage, with melamine bowls of matching spatulas arranged like tulips. Even from outside, I could smell apple cider and cinnamon. I stepped in. There was a woman doing a demonstration on how to make English toffee, and people were crammed around her workstation trying to see exactly how she got such an even covering of nuts. People were also lined up at the cash register clutching fluted ceramic pie dishes, sets of copper cookie cutters, coffee cake mixes and French dish towels tied up with cotton bows. I walked along the far wall past the shelves that held vegetable graters, lemon zesters and wooden spoons in