Excerpt

At precisely 8 o’clock, my VW Beetle was teetering on the side of the road, high atop the tallest peak in Berkeley. Carlos was right: this was nosebleed country, a five-bridge view, as the realtors-to-the-rich would say. Nearly the entire San Francisco Bay Area was visible from the end of the DeNutti’s driveway. Below lay a chimera of white house lights in the canyon and red brake lights on the ribbons of freeway, which meant if you blended the colors together, you would be correct in saying that everything up here was rosy.

If long driveways were a hallmark of wealth, then Dick and Deanna DeNutti had it in the bank. And in the Berkeley hills, where the ice froze and cracked human veins rather than pavement, a long driveway wasn’t so much a physical hazard as a geographical barrier, separating the middle class masses from the haves-way-too-much.