For lunch she runs around the corner for a burrito bowl and eats it standing up in the workshop, scrolling idly through the anonymous social media accounts she maintains for the sole purpose of looking at rambling old houses in New England and rescue dogs living safe and happy lives. She hardly ever bothers checking her email anymore—there is literally never anything that requires her immediate attention—but today mixed in with the junk and the occasional unsolicited dick pic is one message that catches her eye.
Sender: LaSalle, Caroline
Subject: Checking In
Fiona gasps before she can quell the impulse. Caroline hasn’t been her agent in seven years. She hasn’t had an agent at all in seven years, but still the sight of Caroline’s name has her swallowing down an instinctive flicker of dread, the humiliation of having disappointed someone deeply, even though she hasn’t, as far as she knows, done anything wrong today. Ghost shame.
Hi Fiona,
Gosh, it’s been a while! I hope this email finds you healthy and well. You might have seen that I left LGP and started my own agency last year—or maybe not! Not sure how much you keep up with that kind of inside baseball anymore. In any event, I’ve got an opportunity I’d love to chat with you about. Can you do a call sometime this week?
Fiona winces as if someone has slapped her. Can you do a call? is what Caroline used to say when Fiona had screwed up in some public and embarrassing way: Can you do a call because you flipped off a photographer; can you do a call because you were visibly inebriated on a beloved morning talk show at the age of nineteen. Can you do a call so that I can tell you that your show is canceled, your career is over, you’ve ruined your entire life and cost who knows how many hardworking people their jobs all because you couldn’t bother to keep it together for a little while longer?
No, Fiona thinks, shoving her phone back into her pocket without bothering to read Caroline’s two follow-up messages and tossing the rest of her burrito bowl in the trash. She can’t do a call, actually.
“You good?” Richie asks. He’s eyeing her warily from the counter, where he’s folding scrap from the recycling bin into an intricate origami fox. He’s got an entire menagerie of three-dimensional paper animals tacked to the bulletin board in the workshop, next to the mandatory OSHA posters and a flyer he put up for a gig his ska band is doing at a dive bar downtown.
“Totally fine,” Fiona manages, watching as he flips the paper between his nimble fingers. She’s thought about asking him to show her how he does it, but Richie is, like, the one guy in the universe who’s never assumed he could sleep with her and she doesn’t want to give him any ideas. “Never better.”
“Okay,” Richie says, heading up to the counter at the sound of the phone ringing. He hands her the tiny paper sculpture before he goes.
Her dad is sitting in the yard in a lawn chair when she gets home, which is an improvement—yesterday he was sitting in front of the TV in the darkened living room, the blinds drawn against the Sherman Oaks sunshine and a slightly unwashed funk permeating the air. “Hey,” Fiona says brightly. “I picked up some stuff for dinner.” Then, when he doesn’t answer: “Dad?”
“What?” Her dad blinks and comes back to himself, smiling vaguely. “That’s perfect. Thanks, honey.”
She waits for him to get up, but he doesn’t, so after a moment she goes inside and sets the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter, then opens the slider to the backyard, crossing the dry, prickly grass and letting herself into Estelle’s house next door. “Hey,” she calls. “Anybody home?”
“In here!” her sister Claudia calls back.
She finds them sitting in Estelle’s den watching TV and wearing identical Korean sheet masks, highball glasses of ginger ale sweating on malachite coasters on the coffee table. Brando, Estelle’s dozy pit bull, snores happily on the sofa between them. “Hi, sweetheart,” Estelle greets her—at least, Fiona thinks that’s what she says. With the mask on her face it’s hard to tell. Estelle has lived next door for as long as Fiona can remember; she isn’t the casserole-making kind of neighbor, but she left Lean Cuisines on their doorstep for a full month after their mom took off.
“How was school?” Fiona asks Claudia now, perching on the boxy arm of the midcentury sofa. Fiona dropped out when she was fourteen, and she loves to hear the details of what it’s like for her sister, the more mundane the better: the menu options in the cafeteria and who got in trouble for talking in study hall, which of her teachers is the best dresser. Part of it is just that Fiona loves Claudia desperately, but more than that is the mysterious allure of actual high school, which feels like either a disaster she narrowly avoided or a glamorous vacation she missed due to illness. Maybe both.
Claudia peels off her sheet mask, revealing the same high cheekbones as Fiona and a spray of freckles scattered across the bridge of her seventeen-year-old nose. “Stultifying as usual.” She’s still looking at the TV, where a busty nurse in oddly low-cut scrubs is yanking a shaggy-haired doctor into an empty exam room while a soulful acoustic cover of an eighties pop hit plays in the background. “Although a kid in my AP Chem class got suspended for lighting a Pop-Tart on fire inside his desk.”
Fiona blinks, both at the anecdote and at the television. “Wait,” she says after a moment, registering for the first time the broad slope of Sexy Doc’s shoulders, the familiar quirk of his mouth. Right away, and very stupidly, she feels her cheeks get warm. “Is this—？”
“‘A genius in the operating room,’” Estelle intones, echoing the tagline on the dramatically lit billboards plastered all over LA. “‘A fool in love.’”
“Oh my god.” Fiona laughs, but only to avoid some other reaction. She steals another quick glance at the TV. “This show is an abomination,” she says, though she hasn’t actually let herself watch it. The entire conceit of The Heart Surgeon, as far as she can tell, is that the title character—a handsome and charismatic savant with an international reputation for greatness—cannot keep his dick in his pants.
“Don’t be mean!” Claudia chides, bumping Fiona’s knee with her shoulder. “It’s good. I mean, it’s bad-good, but it’s still good.”
“Uh-huh,” Fiona says, leaning forward to take a sip of Claudia’s ginger ale. “See, now that’s what they should put on the billboards.”
“I’ll grant you it’s not exactly Masterpiece Theatre,” Estelle concedes. “Still”—she points at the doctor, who’s pulled his own shirt off to expose a six-pack you could use to scrub grass stains out of your dirty laundry—“one might argue the aesthetics are equally pleasing, in their way.”
“Fiona dated him,” Claudia reports, reaching over to rub Brando on his smooth pink belly.
That gets Estelle’s attention. “Did she, now?”
“False,” Fiona corrects. Sam Fox—the eponymous Heart Surgeon—played Fiona’s cool older brother on Birds of California; he starred in a couple of teary YA adaptations for Netflix after that, then turned up as a three-episode love interest on virtually every network drama before finally landing what is, according to People magazine, his big leading-man break. Not that Fiona reads People magazine. Or Sam’s IMDb page. Because she doesn’t. “I definitely did not date him.”