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internships at the Fed that would turn into real jobs once their dissertations were done. But after visiting Tillie’s architecturally beguiling pink home over Christmas break (when the daytime temperature stayed steady in the high sixties/low seventies), Cress found the Midwestern winter intolerable. Why live where the temperature did not rise above freezing for six weeks straight? Why not return to her sunny hometown and dwell among the very friends off-limits to her in high school? John Bird took her defection well enough; he moped, but never tried to talk her out of it. Who can argue with homesickness?
    Only then she had to find work. She took a CETA job in a university art gallery, but her boss kept forgetting to file the necessary paperwork to pay her. She finally quit to be a waitress at the Dinner Plate, an upscale coffee shop in South Pasadena. But waitressing took so much energy, she had little left for the diss. Writing on her own—without her advisor’s prompts, without John Bird modeling discipline in the same room, and without a firm deadline—was like doing jumping jacks at home: in aerobics class, jumping jacks were as easy as skipping; at home, her arms felt leaden and she soon lost all bounce.
    By the time she moved to the A-frame, all she had was an ambitious prospectus, a rough introduction, and detailed outlines of the first two chapters.
    *   *   *
    On his day off, Jakey took her to the Kern River to fish and swim in the warm, low, late-summer water. He stood up to his thighs, his thick chest pinkening in the sun, and hollered: “Any happier, I’d need a tail to wag.”
    Back when he had his own landscaping firm in the San Fernando Valley, a client had offered him the use of a Meadows cabin. With two days of trout fishing and the alpine air fizzing his blood, he saw the FOR SALE sign on the Meadows Lodge and all interest in hardscape and nursery plants deserted him. Now he grew one box of petunias on the lodge’s deck each summer.
    He and his wife had envisioned lodge life as a family-run business: living above the store, kids doing homework in booths, all pulling together to make it work like the family in a TV show. Little Lodge on the Mountain.
    They put in eighty-, sometimes a hundred-hour workweeks. The bar, restaurant, grocery, and gas pumps didn’t generate a living, so they added caretaking services, housecleaning, a realty office. “I loved every minute,” Jakey told Cress, “but she isn’t such a people person. The public wore her out. She missed her sisters in Northridge. I built her a big house across the way there, but the kids took school buses down the mountain every day, two hours each way; in winter, we never saw them in the daylight. Then they started graduating and leaving. She struggled over that.”
    Even so, Jakey said, he was shocked—no, devastated —when she left. “A cannonball to the head,” he said. “Then my back went out. For four days, I crawled around on all fours like a damn baby. The lowest of the low.”
    His two younger boys, Kevin and Derek, shared a cabin by the Meadows’ back entrance. The oldest boy and two girls lived down the hill in Sawyer and Sparkville. They were in and out of each other’s home all the time.
    *   *   *
    Among the full-time residents, Jakey, Abe Johnson, Barry Sypes, and now Rick Garsh jockeyed for what money and status could be eked from the small community. Each offered caretaking services and patrolled the development, checking the homes on their lists. They opened and shut cabins, they monitored water pipes in the winter, hired housecleaners, often their own wives and daughters. They shoveled decks and stairs. The snowplowing franchise with its small state stipend and aging, orange Oshkosh plow rotated among them.
    Owning the lodge made Jakey the undisputed king of the mountain. He talked to the most people. He saw who