Back then Agnieska was a dental hygienist. I was twenty-eight, working in the sales division of a big electrical cable company, living in a small house around a ten-minute drive down back streets to the house where I grew up and which my parents still called home. I’d landed a starting position in the company around a month after coming down off the poles high above Sequoia. I didn’t think I’d like sales – but Dad knew some honcho in the LA sales division of the company because of all the cable they bought for the studio where he was now the senior electrician in charge of purchasing. He pushed me to meet the sales division guy – who seemed to like me and offered to start me off as his assistant with the idea that I could, in that classic American way, work my way up the corporate ladder. I told Dad that I’d rather start working at Paramount as an electrician. He wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Why d’you think I sent you to college?’ he asked, then answered the question for me: ‘To stop you from ending up like me.’ Since coming back to LA I’d been living at home, I wanted out of home. The sales division guy was offering me a starting salary of $28K a year – not bad in the nineties. The money I’d saved paid for a downpayment on the little house not far from my parents’ place. The salary allowed me to easily cover the mortgage and buy a blue 1975 Mustang that was, back then, my dream car. Two years into the job I was promoted to be one of three assistant sales managers. My dad kept asking me why I didn’t seem to have a girlfriend. I told him work was keeping me too busy for such things. The truth was: every second weekend I’d drive up to Sequoia to see Bernadette. That kept me happy – and in no need of someone in LA. Then Bernadette’s bar got bought by some businessman from Sacramento. He was in his late fifties. Well off. Widowed. Lonely.

‘He’s a pretty nice guy … and he’s offering me security,’ she told me when I saw her for what she said was going to be the absolute last time. ‘I’m now almost forty and still tending bar and still living in a trailer. Is he in any way interesting? A Q-tip is more interesting. But I’m going to get to live a nice life in exchange for being there for him. That’s the deal … and I’m taking it.’

I understood Bernadette’s reasoning behind this decision. It saddened me. Of course I wished her well. Six weeks after she broke it off I was at the dentist’s for my annual checkup and cleaning. Agnieska asked me to open wide, criticized my lack of flossing and …