“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.”