A week ago, the Friday after my term at T M & S ended, James from Apple-One called me about returning to H&C, where I’d temped before. It was an emergency. Someone had died.

H&C is in Cow Hollow, a neighborhood west of Nob Hill and just south of the Marina. It’s a very blond area and H&C is a very blond company. That part of Union Street is a long line of boutiques, coffee shops, crafts stores, restaurants, all upscale, all patronized by slender, well-dressed, pale-skinned people, with either dogs, babies or cell phones, and sometimes all three. The one unshiny note is the Metro, a dying old movie palace whose single screen has marked it for extinction in spite of massive renovations and a window display on the old theater’s history.

I’d worked at H&C for a while last year in the rental department, replacing a very good, organized admin who had simply walked out after a couple of years. She’d left behind an excellent sytem for storing documents on her computer, a few anecdotes about her biker background, and a Grateful Dead sticker on the monitor. Her competence had made my job easy, but they’d plainly liked my work, because I’d returned a month later for another temping job, this time in what was called the “com room” run by Paula, with her long face and her blonde hair pulled back to the nape of her neck with a barrette.

The com room was in the back and upstairs rather than near the front with windows on Union. It was dark and cluttered rather than airy and light. It was also more stressful. Instead of the occasional customer sauntering in for easygoing talks over coffee with the rental agents, there were real estate agents — who are sales people — to serve and placate. As real estate agents, they were twitchier and easier to antagonize, with a tremendous appetite for forms, documents, brochures, and letters, all of which had to be changed at the last moment and run out yesterday.

I had the weekend to anxiously mull over who might have died. Obviously it was someone in admin, not an agent, and not one of the two rental brokers I’d worked with, who were both good-looking, self-assured women of a certain age. It might be Karla, the lovely, blonde-in-spirit admin in her twenties who worked in property management and loved nice clothes and expensive cars, or Shoshanna, the tall, forthright fiftyish woman from North Beach with short red hair and a colorful vocabulary. Or it could be quiet, well-grounded, dark-haired Saffy, who worked in the com room.

I walked to Cow Hollow Monday morning feeling increasingly queasy about finding out who had died. The thing to do, I decided as I came in sight of the building, was to go straight to the com room and talk to Paula. In the past I had always reported first to Portia, the office manager, but she usually didn’t arrive until 9:00, and it was 8:30 now. Paula had liked working with me, had even tried to sound me out about a permanent job, and I was pretty sure she was the one who’d requested me. Paula never minced words. She would give me the low-down on what had happened.

So I walked up the stairs to the com room, but nobody was there except an elderly woman I didn’t recognize, short, slope-shouldered, a bit lost looking. I wandered to the third floor, where all the agents had their desks, poured myself a cup of coffee in the little kitchenette there. Then I carried it downstairs to the com room, still occupied only by the elderly lady. It was she who told me Paula had died.