Birds of California(9)
“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?”