Diane didn’t even chuckle. “Thanks,” she said when Fiona was finished, yanking one of six pens out of her bright red bun and writing something on a legal pad, barely looking up. “We’ll let you know.” Fiona went home and immediately forgot about it until three days later, when Diane called her cell phone and offered Frances Fairbanks the role of Elaine in Arsenic and Old Lace.
That was eighteen months ago. Since then she’s played Catherine in Proof and Mollie Ralston in The Mousetrap and Juror 3 in an all-gender production of Twelve Angry Men. Every time the lights go down Fiona fully expects this to be the last time, for someone in the very back row to jump up and point at her like she’s a witch from The Crucible, but so far she hasn’t been caught.
Probably because there are only ever a dozen and a half people in the audience.
“You guys ready to start?” she asks now, getting to her feet and tying her hair up. Two months ago Diane and her wife started fostering a set of twin girls who’d just gotten out of the NICU, which is how Fiona wound up moonlighting as director of this season’s show, a modern-day imagining of A Doll’s House—not because she knows anything about directing, but because she was sitting in the front row of the theater eating a smoked salmon bagel when Diane got the call from the social worker. “Can you take over?” Diane asked, shoving her marked-up script into Fiona’s hands before speeding off to Target for car seats and diapers. There’s still a smudge of scallion cream cheese on the front of the folder. Fiona had never directed anything in her life—she literally went home and ordered a book called How to Direct Theater from Book Soup—but to her surprise she’s found she actually likes it a lot: imagining each scene in her head before rehearsal, talking to everyone about their characters and what they want. It makes her feel like she’s in control of something, even if that something is a low-end production of an overdone Ibsen play. It makes her feel very calm.
“Okay,” she says once she’s hopped up onto the stage, looking around at the rest of the cast—Larry and Georgie and Hector and DeShaun, Pamela who keeps ferrets and always dresses all in black. Fiona knows it’s only a matter of time until one of them figures out who she is and she has to quit forever. She’s trying to enjoy it while it lasts. “Let’s get to work.”
When she gets home from rehearsal she makes some toast and heads out onto the patio with a pen and a book of vintage LA postcards, settling herself at the wobbly metal table. The ancient party lights strung through the pergola cast a speckled glow across the yard. Fiona is quiet for a long time, listening to the hum of Estelle’s A/C unit and the far-off howl of a coyote. Finally she grits her teeth and ducks her head to write.
Dear Thandie, she starts, then immediately rips the postcard in half and reaches for another one. She’s supposed to be writing a breezy three-line note here, not asking for a letter of recommendation to graduate school.
Hey lady! she tries, feeling herself blush as soon as she sees the words on paper. Ugh, there is no fucking way. It’s always like this when she tries to write to Thandie: a million false starts and a ream of wasted paper, the fog of her own cheery bullshit too thick to see through with any kind of clarity. She remembers when they talked so constantly that everything they said to each other felt like one long, continuous conversation. She remembers when they talked so constantly they didn’t actually need to talk very much at all.
Bonjour, mon petit fromage,
Paris sounds completely dreamy. I like to imagine you, as I imagine literally all French people, wearing a beret with a baguette tucked neatly under your arm for safekeeping, even (especially?) while sleeping or taking a shower.
Things are good here! Quiet, which is always the goal. I’m thinking of asking Estelle if I can join her book club, which reads only BDSM erotica, though my understanding is that there’s a rigorous hazing and I’m not sure I want to voluntarily put myself at the mercy of a dozen randy septuagenarians with a thing for whips and ball gags.
I really, really miss you, she writes before she can stop herself, then crosses the whole thing out and starts again.
The next day dawns smoggy and overcast. Her dad’s having a tough morning, so Fiona leaves him sitting at the kitchen table in his bathrobe and makes the twenty-minute drive to open the shop by herself. Sausage Fest was right that business isn’t exactly booming—the truth is they barely do enough to stay afloat, year to year—but her parents bought the dilapidated building in Eagle Rock back in the nineties, then watched the neighborhood gentrify around them like a garden bursting into vaguely alarming bloom. Now there are three different cycling studios on this block alone.
Fiona turns on the lights and powers up the printers, breathing in the familiar smell of toner and forced air while she waits for the computer to boot. They’ve got a couple of digital orders that need to get out the door today, plus a suite of wedding invitations with half a dozen finicky parts. She’s going to have to wait for Richie to come in to start those—even after twenty years of watching her dad do it, she still always fucks up the letterpress machine—so she flicks on the radio and unpacks a shipment from the paper mill instead, tucking reams of card stock onto the shelves in the workshop according to color and weight. She’s just finishing when the bell above the door rings. “Just a second!” Fiona calls, breaking down the last of the boxes with a neat zip of the utility knife.
When she straightens up and comes out to the counter, Sam Fox is standing on the other side of it, Dodgers cap pulled low over his eyes.
For a moment Fiona just freezes. Then she turns around and marches back into the workshop, where she stares blankly at the Heidelberg for a full ten seconds, seriously considering sneaking out the back and driving all the way to Mexico. But: Claudia, so instead she grits her teeth and goes out again to where Sam is still standing at the counter with his hands in his pockets, head cocked quizzically to the side. You could use his jaw to open a can of corn.
“Hi,” she manages, like he’s any other customer and not . . . whatever he is to her after all this time. Nothing, she tells herself firmly. He isn’t anything. “Can I help you?”
“Holy shit,” he says softly, his green eyes big as two vapid moons. “It is you.”
Fiona frowns. “What?”
He shrugs, the muscles in his shoulders moving inside his expensive-looking white T-shirt. “I just—I thought maybe it was an urban legend or something. When they said you worked here.”
“What?” Holy shit, she cannot believe this is happening. She would have thought that by now she’d be immune to this kind of deep, searing humiliation, like at some point her embarrassment impulse should have calloused over. Clearly, she was wrong. “Who the fuck is ‘they’?”
“I—nobody.” Sam shakes his head, sheepish. “Hi.”
Fiona breathes. “Hi,” she says again. For a moment they just stand there, facing off across the counter. She hasn’t seen him in eight years, since the night of the cast party for his last season of Birds. Actually, it was the last full season of Birds, period, but nobody knew that at the time; it would be a few more months before the network finally lost its patience and pulled the plug on the whole operation. “Do you need something copied?” she asks.
“I—no.” Sam looks confused. “What?”
Jesus Christ. “Why are you here?”
“I was looking for you,” he tells her, and just for one second her heart stops dead inside her chest. “I wanted to talk to you about the reboot.”
Oh. “Oh.” Fiona wills herself not to deflate. Of course that’s what he wants from her. She doesn’t know how she didn’t figure it out as soon as he walked in. Him showing up here sideswiped her somehow, turned her into the kind of naïve, slow-thinking bonehead she was back when she was seventeen. “Well, you could have saved yourself a trip,” she announces, somehow managing to keep her voice even, “because there’s nothing to talk about. I already told them I’m not going to do it.”
“Yeah, I heard.” Sam nods. “How are you?” he asks, after exactly one beat too long. “Sorry, I probably should have led with that.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah?” he asks, taking the cap off and running a hand through his thick, messy hair. “That’s good. I know you kind of had a rough go there for a while.”