Birds of California(15)
Fiona
“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—”