Birds of California(18)
“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.