It was a little box made of fragrant wood. A coat of arms was painted onto its top, its front read FLOR FINA. It fit familiarly into my hands, because it was mine. A cigar box I used to stash my treasures in when I was a kid. It had been lost years ago.
Not lost. Taken. Locked in a safe, in a closet wall, in a room I never entered. A stolen piece of me.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The city
Back then
I don’t remember what I was doing the first time I saw Marion. Lifting fish fingers out of the fryer, probably. Rolling quarters, short-changing some biddy in a rain bonnet because she pissed me off paying for her four-piece plate in nickels. This was when our dads were running a fried-fish shop a couple blocks off the lake.
I was waiting around for the new part-timer. My dad’s wrecked back was just then entering its final decline, and he could no longer handle fourteen-hour days. I was a snotty little brat, still my dad’s princess whenever he wanted me to be, and I’d been looking forward to putting the new hire in her place. Someone else could clean the grease traps for once. But when she walked in, all the snark died in my throat.
Marion was older, seventeen. Ears chewed up with metal, wearing this cool green jacket that was too thin for the weather. But that wasn’t why I was staring. Like a lost set of keys, like a hidden bracelet, something about this girl I’d never seen before drew me in. I could feel her standing there on the rubbed-out tile, denser and realer than anything else in the room.
She stared back. I had my dead mom’s red hair, though hers was curly and mine the sort of watery-fine that folds into points when you pile it. It was winter out but sweltering over the fryer. I was wearing a T-shirt, little freckles of grease burn climbing my arms.
“Have we ever—” she started, at the same time I said, “Do you think we’ve—”
We stopped. A charged silence we could’ve broken with laughter, but didn’t.
“I’m Marion,” she said.
“Dana.”
“Dana.” She repeated the word like it was the name of some unmapped country, still unpacking me with her pale eyes. “We’re gonna be friends.”
Redheads blush easily. You don’t need to be angry or embarrassed for it to happen, you just need to be pushed the slightest bit off center. I lifted my chin and thought of icebergs, of jumping into a cold white ocean. “You think?” I said, a little meanly.
“I know.” Her voice was quiet but strangely commanding, so earnest I could’ve died. Right then I knew she was as maladjusted as I was.
I showed her where to hang her jacket and her black shoulder bag, all the time trying to figure out what it was about her. Her body was stocky, her cheeks ruddy, her ponytail tucked under a newsboy cap. She wasn’t pretty, but there was something in her face that made you want to keep looking. She took a CD from her jacket and held it up. On its black-and-white cover a woman whipped her wet head, hair caught in a wild half-crown.
“Your dad said I could pick the music when I work,” she said. “Where’s your player?”
* * *
Fee and I grew up loving the music our dads loved. Cream, the Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin. Even the polka my dad was raised on, that they played in the Polish dance halls where his parents met. Fee and I used to spin around on bare feet while the record player oompa’ed and crackled and our dads got drunk on ferocious Ukrainian vodka, shouting us on.
The music Marion played was not that kind of music. It was jittery fistfuls of punk, working you over in ninety-second bursts. Heavy guitar rock where it was women who howled like Robert Plant, and glam stuff that glittered and cut like the shards of a colored lantern.
That first day we worked side by side without talking much, Marion picking up the repetitive rhythms of fast-food service while I soaked up the music. At closing time Fee was waiting for me on the curb, playing Tetris with her feet in the gutter. When she saw Marion her face went guarded, before softening the way it does when she’s channeling her empathy thing.
“You’re hungry,” she said.
Marion fiddled with the zip of her jacket. Sometimes Fee’s looks made people shy. “I ate already. In there.”
“That doesn’t count,” Fee said dismissively. “You need food.”
We went back to her place, where there was always a Pyrex tray of something good in the fridge. That night it was picadillo, fragrant with the mint her dad grew on the back porch.
“I don’t really like meat,” Marion told us, before ripping like a Rottweiler through a plateful. Afterward she sighed, her smile changing the balance of her whole odd face.