Why not? Kinkade can afford to dream. The one uncheckable factoid everything written on him can’t fail to include is that supposedly one in twenty American homes has a Kinkade hanging in it. “What the heck, I’m a romantic,” he says on the Christmas Cottage commentary track, explaining that he paints “an art that comforts your heart and reminds you of foundational things, a very sentimental kind of art.” When Oscar Wilde wrote that “a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it,” he didn’t know that someday an American painter would find a way to make sentimentalists pay for it in monthly installments.

I give her a call, and we meet the next day. We meet in a Mexican restaurant Bertolano co-owns. In addition to her work as a loan specialist and restaurateur, she also works as a legal assistant for a bankruptcy lawyer. Bertolano, who tells me to call her Vienna, is a petite Filipina in her midfifties with a slight accent. “Vallejo,” she tells me, “was going to be the new Silicon Valley. It was a thriving market. People could buy investment homes here and see them go up 30 percent right away. When the bubble burst in late ’06, middle- and lower-income buyers who could barely afford $1,500 a month in rent were stuck with $350,000 homes they’d bought with no money down. In 2005 there were never houses here for less than $300,000. Now there are over 2,000 houses selling in Solano County for less than $100,000, many of them for around $35,000. The only people buying them are investors. And it’s going to get a lot worse. It’s going to be bleak.”