“Okay,” Fiona says half an hour later, rolling her eyes at him as she tips the base of an ugly table lamp upside down to check the price tag on the bottom. “Can you stop that, please?”
“Stop what?” Sam asks. They’re standing in the housewares section of a Goodwill on the very outskirts of Hollywood, surrounded by other people’s castoffs.
“Swanning around like that,” Fiona says, setting the lamp back down on the shelf and crouching to examine a wobbly-looking end table. “Not all of us are trying to get asked for our autograph.”
Sam frowns. “I’m not swanning,” he protests, looking a little stung. “This is my normal walk.”
“It’s not just your walk,” she says, straightening up again. “It’s your whole—” She gestures at him vaguely. He’s wearing dark jeans and a pair of expensive-looking lace-up boots that are too hot for LA, a chambray shirt rolled to his elbows. A pair of sunglasses that probably cost as much as her car dangle from the ostentatiously unbuttoned V of his collar. “Forget it.”
“Also,” Sam says as he follows her down the aisle past wall décor, where half a dozen Live Laugh Love canvases teeter like cursed dominoes on a rickety metal shelf, “anyone who says they don’t want to get asked for their autograph is lying. You don’t do what we do if you don’t want to get asked for your autograph.”
“What you do,” Fiona corrects him.
But Sam shakes his head. “Nice try,” he says, draping a macramé wall hanging over his shoulders like a shawl. “Except for the part where apparently you’re still secretly acting.”
Fiona doesn’t have an answer for that, but luckily Sam doesn’t seem to expect one. He drops the wall hanging back where he found it and wanders over to office supplies, mostly empty boxes of #10 envelopes and discarded three-ring binders with the labels half scratched off. “Why do all Goodwills smell the same?” he wonders out loud.
“Human dander and broken dreams,” Fiona says, glancing at him sidelong. “Have you been to a lot of Goodwills in your life?”
“Yes, actually.” Sam shrugs, no hesitation in his voice at all. “Before I started booking print work, at least.”
That surprises her. Fiona always figured Sam came from some kind of rich Midwestern dynasty, that his dad was in steel or oil or something and they had season tickets to the Green Bay Packers. “When was that?” she asks.
“I was ten,” he says. “Or nine, maybe? I had the right look for back-to-school clothes.”
“You still have the right look for back-to-school clothes.”
“Thank you.”
“What makes you think that was a compliment?”
“You said it in a complimentary tone of voice.”
“Did I?”
“You did,” he tells her confidently, and before Fiona can figure out how to reply, he lets out a sound that’s halfway between a laugh and a bark. “Holy shit,” he crows, disbelieving. “Look at this.”
“What?” Fiona asks, full of dread. It’s a crapshoot, shopping at Goodwill. One time she found a family of baby mice nestled cozily in the pocket of a crocheted cardigan she bought for Arsenic and Old Lace.
But when Sam turns around he’s grinning. “Oh, nothing,” he sings, holding up—for fuck’s sake—a Birds of California pencil case, hot pink plastic with a yellow zipper and a garish cartoon of Fiona’s own face emblazoned across the front, a bright green parrot sitting on her shoulder. “Just trying to figure out what I’m going to keep in this baby, that’s all.”
Fiona huffs a breath. “Give me that,” she says. She grabs for it, but Sam yanks it away, holding it up over his head and switching it from hand to hand like they’re playing keep-away on the playground in elementary school. He’s a lot taller than she remembers; close up he smells like cologne and deodorant, and a tiny bit like sweat.
“I mean, the answer is weed and papers, obviously,” he says thoughtfully, still holding the pencil case aloft like a flag from a country where they lived in some other lifetime. “But that feels almost too easy? Like, surely we can do better than that.”
“Oh, you’re very funny.”
“Only ninety-nine cents,” Sam reports happily. “A bargain at twice the price.”
Fiona shakes her head, turning and pushing the cart in the direction of women’s clothing. Honestly, let him have it. Better than letting him know she cares one way or the other, that the very idea of Birds of California paraphernalia still existing in the world—clogging up secondhand stores and landfills, moldering away in Rubbermaids in the basements of people’s childhood homes and contributing to the rapid warming of the planet—makes her want to peel her skin off like wallpaper. “Is there Heart Surgeon swag?” she asks. “Branded catheters, et cetera?”
“Bedpans, maybe,” Sam says, trotting along behind her. “I signed a licensing agreement. If there is I should probably try and get my hands on some. Collector’s items.”
Fiona hums. “Are you bummed about it?” she can’t help but ask, slinging an A-line skirt and a ruffly blouse over the edge of the cart. “Your show, I mean?”
Sam shrugs. “Yeah, of course,” he allows, pulling an ancient-looking trucker hat bearing the logo of the San Francisco 49ers from a basket and modeling it casually in a nearby mirror. “I liked the people I worked with. Plus it’s hard not to feel responsible, you know? Nobody wants to be the reason a whole crew gets fired.” Then he looks at her and immediately blanches. “I mean—”
Fiona smirks, though it’s not like it doesn’t smart a little. Still, she knows it’s true. Jamie said as much to her, once she’d finally committed so many obscenities in so many public venues that the Family Network yanked Birds from the schedule. “Do you have any idea what you just did?” he demanded, his cheeks gone red and blotchy underneath a day’s worth of beard. There was a tiny drop of spit at one corner of his mouth. “The number of hardworking people whose lives you just shat all over?” She was twenty years old at the time.
“You’re going to get head lice,” she says now, reaching out and plucking the cap off Sam’s head and putting it back on the shelf before reconsidering at the last second and throwing it into the cart instead. She’ll put it in the washer on sanitize. Claudia will like it. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Anyway,” Sam says, trailing her up to the cash register, “I’m trying to look at it as an opportunity. You know, to do the kind of stuff I’ve always wanted to do.”
“Shakespeare?” Fiona asks dryly.
“Porn,” he deadpans, then turns and smiles broadly at the moon-eyed checkout girl.
“I’d like to purchase this excellent pencil case, please.”
Fiona ducks her head to hide her grin.
“Are you hungry?” Sam asks her as he pushes the cart out into the parking lot, its bum wheel screaming bloody murder against the crooked asphalt. In the end Fiona found nearly everything she needs: a briefcase for Larry and matching Christmas outfits for the kids, a couple of ugly paintings for the living room set. Her mom taught her the trick of thrifting in expensive neighborhoods, which makes one useful thing her mom ever did. “We could go grab lunch.”
Fiona hesitates. On the one hand, yes, she’s always hungry, but on the other she doesn’t want him to think . . . anything. “Where?” she asks, hedging.
Sam shrugs. “Pink’s?”
Fiona snorts. “Why,” she says, “so we can wait in line for an hour in the blazing sun and people can take pictures of us together and then everyone will assume I already said yes to the show, at which point I’ll think to myself, Gee, I might as well just do it?”
Sam looks at her like she’s unhinged. “I mean, I was suggesting it more because I like hot dogs,” he says calmly. “But I agree that that would have been very clever of me.”
Fiona gazes back at him for a long moment, suspicious. Tempted, and trying not to be. His eyes are very, very green.
“I know a place,” she finally says.
She takes him to a diner on Pico Boulevard, an old-fashioned East Coast Greek situation with fraying Naugahyde booths and jukeboxes bolted to the wall at each table boasting such contemporary hits as “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” There’s a full bar behind the counter, with a million different kinds of cocktail glasses hanging from an overhead rack.
“I always wonder who comes into places like this to get hammered,” Sam says, squinting at the dusty bottles of crème de menthe and sambuca. “Like, I’ll have two scrambled eggs and a Rusty Nail, please.”
Their waitress appears just then, wearing sensible sneakers and a name tag that says KAREN, her hair in a graying bun at the back of her head. “Hi, Karen,” Sam says with a smile, then proceeds to flirt with her until she’s blushing like a teenager, hiding her pale mouth behind her notepad. Fiona rolls her eyes and orders a patty melt and french fries. Sam orders cold baked salmon on greens.
“Wait a second,” Fiona says to him, holding a hand up. “Excuse me. What happened to ‘I love hot dogs’?”
“Are you kidding?” Sam grins. “I haven’t eaten a hot dog in like six years.” He nudges his ankle against hers under the table, winking. “It was a good plan, though, right? The Pink’s thing.”
“Oh my god.” Fiona shakes her head slightly, hoping she looks more annoyed than she actually is. “I’m leaving.”
“You’re not leaving. Karen,” Sam says, utterly unfazed, “may we please also get one hot dog with the works?”
Karen smiles, doe-like. “You sure can, peaches.”
“Can I ask you something?” Fiona asks once she’s gone, sitting back in the booth and crossing her arms at him. “Why do you assume that every woman finds you charming?”
He shrugs. “Experience, mostly. Can I ask you something?”
“I would prefer that you didn’t.”
Sam ignores her. “You answered the phone, right?”
Fiona plucks a sour pickle from the dish on the table and takes a bite, then immediately realizes her mistake—it tastes like canned garlic and standing water, mushy and sad. “What?” she asks, once she’s swallowed.
“When your agent called you about the show, you answered the phone. So there must be a tiny part of you that wants to have a career again.”
“I have a career,” Fiona reminds him.
“At a copy shop?” Sam looks dubious.
Oh, that annoys her. “It’s my father’s business,” she snaps, temper sparking like flint against steel. “That he built with his two hands, and that paid for the house that I grew up in and my sister’s braces and my stupid fucking acting lessons. It’s not some random Kinko’s.”
Sam blinks. “No, I—sorry,” he says quietly. “I didn’t mean to—you know.”
Fiona feels her shoulders drop. “It’s fine,” she says, a little embarrassed—wishing, not for the first time, that she was the kind of person who didn’t get so worked up over every little thing. Pam, if she was here, would advise a deep breath. Instead Fiona finishes the rubbery, tepid pickle, then reaches for another one just for something to do.
“Are you really going to eat those?” Sam asks.
“Yes,” she says immediately, crunching as loud as she can.
“Because I’m just saying, they’ve probably been sitting out here all day.”
“Great,” she says, and picks up a third. “Plenty of time for them to cure.”
Sam takes a sip of his unsweetened iced tea, an expression on his face like Have it your way, psycho. “What about Thandie?” he asks.
Fiona doesn’t choke, but it’s a near thing. “Thandie?” she manages to repeat, eyes watering a little. She clears her throat. “Thandie . . . would probably not eat the free pickles, no.”
Sam makes a face. “You guys were friends, weren’t you?”
“We are friends,” Fiona says automatically, though in truth she hasn’t seen Thandie in almost five years. The last time they hung out in person, Fiona convinced her to go to a party the second-cutest member of a popular boy band was throwing in a suite at the Chateau; the next day pictures of Fiona’s bleary face were everywhere, but Thandie had somehow managed to stay out of the camera’s panoptic eye. “I know acting isn’t a big deal for you, or whatever,” Thandie said quietly, picking at a fray in her sweater as they drank iced lattes on the couch in her apartment that morning, “but it’s serious for me. And not for nothing, Fiona, but the world tends to be a lot less forgiving of bullshit from people who look like me.” Six months later Fiona sat on a couch in the common room at the hospital and watched as Thandie accepted an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; Fiona’s never said it to anybody, but it’s still the proudest moment of her life, and if getting the hell away from her is what Thandie needed to do to make it happen, then Fiona guesses she has nobody to blame but herself.
“Well,” Sam says now, gazing at her across the table, “what does she say?”
Fiona snorts. “Thandie isn’t going to do a Birds of California reboot in a million years,” she promises flatly.
“Why not?”
“Because she’s a serious actor!”
“I’m a serious actor,” he counters, and Fiona throws her head back and laughs.
Sam’s plush, pretty mouth drops open. “Fuck off!” He’s laughing, too, though Fiona can’t tell if she’s imagining that he also looks just a tiny bit hurt. “I am!”
“You’re something,” she admits without thinking, and right away she feels herself blush. “I mean—”
But Sam is shaking his head. “Don’t patronize me,” he tells her, then gestures down at his general person. “Come on, Fee, do you really want me to hide this light under a bushel? Or are you just too good for TV?”
“I’m not too good for TV,” she says honestly. “I’m not too good for acting, either. I like acting. I just didn’t like . . . everything that came with it.”
“Money?” Sam asks. “Fame? People bending over backward to meet your every need and desire?”
Fiona huffs a laugh. “Oh, is that your experience of it?”
“Sometimes,” he says easily. “So when we were doing Birds, that was just, like, all torture for you?”
Fiona hesitates. She remembers running around the UBC lot with Thandie, the two of them eating craft services chocolate chip cookies and making dirty fortune-tellers from the pages of their scripts. She remembers nailing a scene in one take and knowing it was funny. She remembers Sam in the alley outside the wrap party that very last night, his warm, curious mouth pressed against hers, and finally she shakes her head.
“No,” she admits. “Not all of it.”
Karen returns with their food just then, and once Sam has done his little bit about how much he loves her and how she’s his perfect woman, he turns back to Fiona. “So,” he says, squeezing a lemon slice over his unadorned salmon, “what’s A Doll’s House about?”
“None of your business,” she says pleasantly, and takes a bite of her patty melt.
“Oh, you want me to guess? Why didn’t you say so?” Sam smiles. “It’s about dolls that come alive in the night.”
“Nailed it in one,” she tells him, but Sam keeps going.
“It’s about sex robots. It’s about little girls doing evil spells. It’s about shrinking down to get away from capitalism, like that Matt Damon movie.”
Fiona sighs. “It’s about a woman who has a bunch of stuff happen to her and suddenly realizes she isn’t in charge of her own life or reputation,” she tells him. “So she decides to do something about it.”
“That was my next guess,” Sam says. “Does she kill herself at the end?”
Fiona stares at him for a moment. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’m not saying I want her to kill herself,” he says quickly. “I just feel like a lot of those stories end with women walking into the ocean with rocks in their pockets or putting their heads in the oven or something.”
“I mean, you’re not wrong,” she admits, “but no. She leaves her husband and children and the play ends with the sound of the door shutting behind her.”
Sam nods. “That,” he says approvingly, “is kind of metal.”
Fiona smiles; she can’t help it. “For 1879?” she asks. “Yeah, I’d say it’s pretty metal.”
“Who do you play?”
Fiona reaches for a french fry, not quite meeting his gaze. “Nora,” she reports, feeling oddly shy.
“Who’s Nora?”
“The butler.” She looks up then, catching Karen’s eye as she bustles by with a pot of coffee in one hand. “Excuse me,” she says sweetly. “Could we possibly get some more pickles?”
The sun is just starting to set when Sam drops her home, the palm trees darkly silhouetted against a sky streaked in pinks and blues and oranges. The air smells like star jasmine and smoke. Sometimes Fiona wishes she didn’t love California so much, that she could pick up and pack her bags and start over in New York or Chicago, but then she looks around on nights like this and knows they’ll bury her in this sherbet-colored desert. She’ll wander the canyons and haunt the hills until the end of the breathing world.
“Last stop, cowgirl,” Sam says as he pulls into the driveway, glancing at her sidelong. “This was . . .” He trails off. “You know.”
“Not as uniquely horrible as I thought it would be,” Fiona admits.
Sam grins. “Generically horrible, only.”
“Exactly.” Fiona makes a face. Sam makes one back, then holds her gaze, shifting his weight in the leather bucket seat. She can see the flecks of amber in his eyes. She’s not sure if she’s imagining that he’s leaning in just a little bit closer, his gaze flicking down to her mouth for the barest of moments, but she’s picturing it before she can stop herself: his hands and his tongue and his straight white teeth, the rasp of his day-old beard against her chin. It occurs to her to wish she hadn’t eaten four sour pickles back at the diner. She hasn’t kissed anyone in a long time.
Jesus Christ, what is she thinking?
Fiona straightens up as fast as if someone poked her in the back with a pencil. Right away, Sam straightens up, too. “So, listen,” he says, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck, “you should think about the reboot.”
Fiona feels her entire body drop, involuntary, like someone pulling the plug on a novelty pool float. Probably good, she reminds herself, to be clear about exactly what he’s been after all day long. “I . . . will definitely not be doing that,” she promises him brightly. “Take care of yourself, Sam.”
“I—yeah,” he says. Fiona has no idea what exactly she feels so disappointed about. “You too.”
She takes a moment to gather herself once he’s gone, standing outside the front door of the house as the taillights of his ridiculous, embarrassing car disappear around the corner. It occurs to her that being with Sam felt like being onstage—not like she was performing, exactly, but more like she was lost in something besides her normal life. Like she was someone else for a while. It wasn’t the worst feeling in the world.
Inside the house her father is sitting in the same exact place where she left him this morning, the light from the TV flickering across his face. “Hey, Dad,” she says gently, knocking on the doorframe like it’s his bedroom, which honestly it might as well be. For a moment she remembers how he used to be back when she was a little kid, growing basil in big pots on the patio and making Special Scramble on Saturday mornings after her swim meets. “How was your day?”
He looks up—surprised, though Fiona isn’t sure if it’s because he didn’t realize she was back or because he didn’t realize she was gone to begin with. “Fine, honey.”
“How about a shower before dinner?”
Her dad shakes his head, eyes on the screen. “I’m not hungry, sweetheart.”
Fiona bites her tongue so hard she tastes iron. Sometimes she gets so mad at her mom for leaving that she almost can’t breathe. Fiona deserved it; she knows that about herself. But Claudia didn’t. “That’s not really what I said, Dad.” She forces herself to smile. “Come on, quick rinse.”
Eventually her dad sighs and shuffles off toward the bathroom. Fiona resists the urge to stand outside the closed door and listen for the sound of the running water, but barely. Instead she heads out into the backyard, where Claudia is sitting on the patio reading some four-thousand-page fantasy book and rubbing one bare foot along Brando’s bristly back. Claudia found Brando wandering crookedly down their street when she was twelve; he was flea-bitten and emaciated and had a giant scar on one side of his neck that suggested an extremely checkered past, but as soon as he saw Claudia he stopped, rolled over, and begged to be petted. Fiona’s father is allergic to dogs, but Estelle isn’t, and so Brando has lived with her ever since, although periodically Fiona comes into Claudia’s room to wake her up for school in the morning and finds him curled into the shape of a doughnut at the bottom of her sister’s bed.
“Oh hello,” Claudia says now, marking her place with her index finger and peering at Fiona through a pair of cat-eye glasses with no lenses. “How was your date?”
Fiona comes up behind her and scoops Claudia’s hair off her neck, liking the thick, silky weight of it in her hands. “It wasn’t a date,” she says, which is true, though there’s still a tiny part of her that feels pleasantly dazed in the aftermath, like maybe he kissed her after all. He wants her to do the show, Fiona reminds herself firmly. That’s all any of that was.
Claudia looks unconvinced. “Did you eat?” she asks.
“Yes,” Fiona admits grudgingly.
“Date.”
“Oh, right.” Fiona tugs Claudia’s hair lightly, dragging Claudia’s head back to peer at her upside down. “Is that how it works at school?”
Claudia snorts. “Uh, no. Definitely not.”
“Just for olds like me?”
“And Estelle,” Claudia says. “Probably for Estelle, too.”
“Nah,” Fiona says, letting go of Claudia’s hair. “Estelle is on the apps.”
“Down to fuck,” Claudia agrees, and follows Fiona back inside.
For dinner Fiona makes chicken quesadillas and microwaves some broccoli with butter and salt, tucking a folded paper towel under the silverware beside Claudia’s plate. She always makes Claudia sit at the table, even if she’s the only one eating. “We’re not animals,” she says, when Claudia complains.
She’s headed for the fridge to see if there’s any sour cream left when she catches sight of her reflection in the glass of the microwave door, then frowns and lifts a hand to her earlobe. “Shit,” she mutters. She drops to her knees on the floor, running her hands over the tile and coming up with a palmful of crumbs. “We should vacuum,” she observes.
“What are you doing?” Claudia asks, peering down at her with consternation.
“I lost an earring.” Fiona grimaces. “Mom’s earring. The pearl.”
Right away, Claudia scuttles down off her chair and crouches beside Fiona, her hair making a curtain around her face. “When was the last time you saw it?” she asks, peering under the table.
Fiona shakes her head. “This morning, maybe? I don’t know.” She retraces her steps, the patio and the living room and the front yard, but it’s useless. The thing is probably in the pocket of some cigarette-smelling blazer at the East Hollywood Goodwill, or down the garbage disposal at the diner with leftover hash browns and the curly rinds of orange slices. “It’s okay,” she says finally, sitting back on her haunches, though it doesn’t feel okay. “We’re not going to find it.”
“Probably not,” Claudia agrees, and something about the way she accepts the inevitability of disappointment makes Fiona feel about three inches tall.
“Come on,” she says, scrambling inelegantly to her feet and holding out a hand. Their dad is still shut in his room. “Let’s go get doughnuts.”
Claudia grins.
They get in Fiona’s car and head for the twenty-four-hour Krispy Kreme on Crenshaw, neon lights streaking by outside the glass. They started doing this after their mom left, Fiona waking her sister up at two or three in the morning and loading her into the car for the long haul across the city, both of them singing along to Stevie Nicks or Pat Benatar on K-Earth 101. Krispy Kreme has a drive-through but Claudia loved to stand outside the plate glass window on the side of the building and watch the doughnuts rolling by on the conveyor belt, and Fiona loved how much she loved it enough that she was willing to let Darcy’s goons take her picture from time to time.
Tonight they stay in the car, Fiona taking the box from the girl at the window and handing it carefully across the gearshift to her sister. “Careful,” she says, breathing in the warm smell of sugar and fry grease, the night air thick and soupy through the open window. “Still hot.”