The Last Beach Bungalow (19 page)

When Jackie heard that the dog experiment had failed, she grew very quiet. For nearly three days, she hardly spoke. She was more devastated, it seemed, than she had been when Max broke up with her. I checked her e-mail once, just to make sure she was OK. She’d written a note to her friend Alyssa:

My mom hated having Bo here. She hates dogs. I think it’s because she can’t stand the idea of unconditional love. She can’t give it and she can’t take it, either. I can’t wait to get out of this house.

I have entertained the thought that Jackie found out I was reading her e-mail and wrote that note on purpose to teach me a lesson. The words might as well be etched on the backs of my corneas. I can see them even when I close my eyes. I like to think they’re no longer true.

Under my beautiful Italian range hood, on the six-burner Wolf stove, I learned how to make chicken tamales with meat that has simmered in a mild tomatillo sauce. I peel the papery skin off the tomatillos by hand, and throw them in the pot with the chicken. After a few hours, the whole house smells good. Lucy tells me that this is the way every house smells in Cuernavaca, Mexico, her family’s hometown; to her, it’s the exact essence of home. In exchange for her teaching me about tamales, I am teaching her how to play the piano. She happened to come by on the day the movers set up my grandmother’s Bösendorfer beneath the big picture window in the living room. She knocked on the door just as the last leg was being screwed down.

“Come in,” I said. “Come in and hear this grand piano!”

I paid the movers, then pulled up the black padded bench and played the first phrase of my old favorite Two-Part Invention. It sounded horrible. The keys were grossly out of tune, but I kept playing.

Lucy sat on the edge of the couch and listened—a little audience of one. I could see the look on her face, that look of being overwhelmed by music for the first time.

“Have you ever heard Bach?” I asked.

“What’s Bach?” she asked.

“Johann Sebastian Bach. The composer. He wrote the music.”

“It makes me sad, this music.”

“That’s what he wanted.”

“To make people sad?”

“Sometimes it feels good to feel sad,” I explained.

“Have you ever played the piano?” I asked Lucy.

“This woman, I clean her house and she has a piano.”

“Come sit down,” I urged.

“No, no,” she said.

“You won’t hurt it,” I said. She came and perched the edge of the little bench.

“This is middle C,” I said, pointing to the key. “It’s the note where everything else begins. Try it.”

She pressed the key, and the note sounded flat from the months in storage.

“Now do this,” I said to Lucy. I positioned her fingers so that she could play an open chord. She played the three notes and looked at me, thrilled.

“Would you like to learn how to play?”

“There are too many keys.”

“You can start with just three, then go to eight. It’s not hard. I’ll teach you.”

My house is just wallboard and wood. It won’t save me, I’m certain of that. But my husband built this house for me, and for Jackie, and for himself, and it’s an awfully nice place to be when the sun lowers itself into the ocean and the sky glows orange all the way from Catalina to Malibu. The pelicans fly low over the water in these perfect V’s. They’re very big birds, and they skim the water with amazing precision. We sit and watch the show, in awe of the color and the space and the black specks they make on the horizon. On nights like that, I feel like I’m at the helm of a boat that’s making its way across the sea. I wouldn’t say that I feel in charge, but I feel good.

I feel very good.

FOURTEEN CONVERSATION STARTERS FOR HOME SEEKERS, BREAST CANCER SURVIVORS, SHOE LOVERS AND OTHERS WHO MAY WANT TO DISCUSS THIS BOOK WITH THEIR FRIENDS
PLUS

Two Behind-the-Scenes Moments from the Author

BEHIND-THE-SCENES MOMENT #1: THE SPARK THAT IGNITED THE LAST BEACH BUNGALOW

In the middle 2000s, during one of Southern California’s frenzied housing booms, my husband and I were looking to trade our Los Angeles starter home for something bigger, better and snazzier, because we thought this was an inalienable right. After two years of searching for a house that we liked that we could afford, our Realtor called from the sidewalk in front of a house about a mile away. It was, she explained, the deal of the century—a good house on a great piece of property in a prime part of town, priced slightly below market value. I jumped in the car and sped over to meet her. She was standing with a crowd of people in the front yard. I recognized several friends of ours in the mix—friends I knew to be looking for houses, too. My husband and I made a bid, but by the end of the day, the price of the house had skyrocketed out of our reach.

In the weeks that followed, I heard a rumor that the house had been purchased for $100,000 over the asking price by a Realtor who had illegally bid against his own client. I found myself wondering about him from time to time, and about all the other people who had bid on that house—what their stories were, and what they had gained and lost. A few months later, I climbed onto a yellow school bus to chaperone a school field trip and took a seat next to the man who had purchased the house. “You don’t know me,” I said, “but you bought the house I wanted.”

He turned to face me. “I actually do know you,” he confessed. “My wife had cancer, too.” I had written a book about my experiences with cancer, and sometimes forgot that anyone outside my family had read it; I was completely disarmed.

He smiled. “So do you hate me?” he asked.

“I don’t
hate
you,” I said, “but I’ve thought a lot about what happened with that house.”

“My wife wanted a home where she could live and a home where she could die,” he explained. “She decided that was the house and I would have done anything to get it.”

I knew in that instant that I would write a story about a man, a woman and a marriage, and the fierce feelings we bring to the search for home.

My husband and I ended up abandoning our search for a new house and decided to remodel instead. I wrote
The Last Beach Bungalow
while the walls came down around us. April has a much cooler house than I do and a
way
better view, but I had a better five-year cancer-free celebration: I took a sunrise walk through a seaside labyrinth and threw a painting party on the concrete subfloor of our new living room.

BEHIND THE SCENES MOMENT #2: A REAL-LIFE CONTEST TO WIN A HOUSE

There was an actual essay contest held to win a multimillion dollar home in a town not far from mine. This wasn’t a fund-raising raffle for a nonprofit organization; it was a contest put on by an individual. Each person who sent in an essay about why they wanted to live in this house had to pay a fee of about $140. Thousands of people entered, and there was a great deal of interest in the outcome. What could one person say that would be somehow better than what thousands of other people said? A winner was chosen, but then things got strange. The winner gave the house back to the owner, and it was soon revealed that the winner was actually a distant relative of the owner—a cousin’s husband or something like that. The whole thing had been rigged; it was a scam. People who paid their $140 were obviously disappointed—and motivated to take legal action—but I was particularly crushed by the ruse. I loved the idea of someone believing that they could pick out of a crowd the perfect person to inherit their home. I loved the idea of someone being able to win a house on the merits of their story alone. I commandeered the basic elements of the contest, conjured up a wonderful widow to run it, and ended up with the spine of my story.