Frankie Zwick

Our satellite phone looked like any regular phone—made of that white plastic that goes yellow pretty fast, with a cord to the receiver that just crawled around your fingers when you talked on it. Most often the connection sounded more like two tin cans tied together with a string, with the voice on the other end echoing in the aluminum, and when you picked up the handset you always had to wait longer than you thought for the line to click on. Timing it took some practice, but after thirteen years growing up on the Bitterroot Ranch in western Montana, I got to know it like a heartbeat. It rang that day around seven o’clock, while the pork chops were soaking in their brine on the kitchen counter, and my mother answered.

Lil and I were setting the table in the dining room. It didn’t get dark till about ten o’clock that time of year, and lately we’d been having dinner in broad daylight. The field outside was hot yellow, and inside the dust glowed on the black potbelly stove. I was putting down the paper napkins and Lil was trapping them under the water glasses, heavy and sort of indelicate, like she was catching a moth. She looked tired. Her knuckles were cracked at the creases from the dozens of dishes she’d passed through soap and scalding water three times a day, and her shirt was stained with bleach where the lip of the kitchen sink met her belly button. I loved that t-shirt, the green one that said M

S*H across the front with the orange nebula of Clorox right in the middle. A strand of her dry blond hair came loose and floated towards the table, lit up electric with the light from the window.

Ma pushed open the door to the kitchen with the meat pounder still in her hand, and her words came in like the five o’clock news.

“That was Caleb’s mother,” she said. “He left Knoxville yesterday and nobody’s heard from him since.”

The glass was out of Lil’s hand before the door swung back. I don’t know if Ma saw or pretended not to, but it was just me and Lil standing there when the din stopped and every piece of china was sitting under a million shards of glass, glittering like dew.

“Lil?” I whispered. She had a look on her face like she didn’t quite know what to cry about first.

“If it isn’t one thing, Jo,” she said, taking a deep breath, “it’s a dozen.”

In June of 1993, my sister married a drunk. His name was Caleb, and they’d had the wedding on my Grandparents farm in Idaho, in the cherry orchard a week after the harvest. It was a nice idea, but all the guests had gone barefoot and spent most of the afternoon wading through grass sticky with overripe cherry meat. By the end of it the bottoms of their feet were blood red and the hem of Lil’s dress looked like a massacre. She smiled, Pa wept. My brothers shot a pig to roast and paid it more attention than they did Lil all night, while Ma had almost as many whiskeys as the groom. I couldn’t tell one way or another how sober Caleb was, but I was only ten then and had known him about as many minutes.

I guessed he wasn’t the night before though. Lil had been sleeping in my room, and when I walked out of the bathroom I nearly dropped my toothbrush. Caleb was sitting on the bed in his underwear with a sewing kit and a bottle of black ink on the quilt in front of him. Lil was opposite him, his right hand balanced around her neck while his left ran the needle in a circle just under her collar bone.

“Don’t fuck it up,” she breathed, and her chest fluttered.

“I’m gonna have to if you want them to match.” Caleb smiled, and I noticed the tattoo by his left shoulder. It was a circle the size of a dollar coin, like Lil’s, only blotchy and perforated like a line that should have said, ‘cut here.’ The ink on their hands was shiny, and they were covered in each others fingerprints.

“I never was any good with a sewing needle,” she said back.

“Guess I’ll have to find some other heifer to mend my clothes then.”

“Damn right you will,” Lil said, and she smiled like I’d never seen her before.

I went back inside the bathroom and waited till Caleb had gone to come out, but by then Lil was asleep. After that she didn’t come back with us to Montana because Caleb took her south to Tennessee, and for a while that was the last I heard from my sister. When I think of the wedding now it’s usually that the cherry stones between my toes felt like stepping on snails, and I can’t remember much more of Caleb than his inky fingernails the night before. Even in the years after when I would try and think of Lil, she looked like she did that day—cherry gore creeping up the lace of her dress and the little stitches of the tattoo holding her together like the bride of Frankenstein. A while later when she started calling from Knoxville she still sounded a bit like a ghost, her voice spooky in the receiver. But it was usually late at night, and she always made me hand over the phone to Ma pretty quick.

The day Caleb’s mother called Pa had taken out the plane to round up our herd, but he’d missed two cows on his way up the valley. By the time he landed the Husky in the pasture at the main house he decided it was too late to go back for them with the plane, so my brothers had set out on horseback to push them the rest of the way in. My little brother Hank was nine and had begged to go along, but I bet he was regretting it now. It would be about eight miles down the ridge before they could even start looking for the cows, let alone get them back. By the time we heard from them it was midnight.

“Pa, can you come in?” Duke’s voice came in over the radio in the kitchen. Pa picked up a handset.

“I sure hope you found them, boys,” he sighed, mocking them with the dearth of optimism in his voice. His grey mustache was grown nearly past his bottom lip, seemingly to obscure his smirk at times like these. “Your mother’d like to get to bed and I don’t have much power left in me to deprive her,” he added, to torture them a bit.

“Come on Pa, we’re not more than three quarters of the way down. There’s no way we’d get ‘em tonight anyhow, it’s darker than the inside of Hank’s skull out here.”

There was a pause, during which my father smiled but didn’t reply, and instead let the boys’ failure steep a little longer in the radio static. When I was younger I’d known him to stay out all night hunting down a lost cow. Once he’d severed the tendon in his left ring finger getting a calf out of barbed wire. That’s because each cow at auction was worth more than twenty-five hundred dollars to our family, and if you asked him whether that was worth losing his wedding band, he’d lie. But it’d been almost a year since Pa had even been in the saddle—said he didn’t like the way a trot made his guts roll—and I think he was that much harder on the boys to make up for it.

“Can’t you just get ‘em with the plane tomorrow?” Duke crackled in.

“Alright girls. Go get your brothers.”

Lil took out the ham and pickles and had me fix some sandwiches while she warmed up the car. Even late summer nights were blue cold in the Montana hills.

“Don’t you think we ought to put something else on them?” The slices of Wonder Bread on the counter were so thin you could still see the dents were my hand had held them.

“They been out there since four o’clock, Jo. They won’t know the difference,” Lil said and walked out of the kitchen. I opened the fridge and dipped a knife into the mayonnaise, then slapped it on one of the white slices. Duke loved mayonnaise.

Before we could even hitch up the trailer Lil had gone out to unplug the white Ford f350 from the extension chord in the shed. The battery hadn’t worked without a jump in nearly a decade so Pa had run a little plug out from under the front hood, and we had to keep it charging every night. Even then the thing was about as reliable as fate. I would have bet it couldn’t even make the forty miles to the post office. If we needed to get to town—to sell our dairy or stock up on beans and Crisco for the winter—we’d take the plane.

The plane was a Husky A1-A that Pa bought in ’91, along with the acres that brought our land up to the national forest boundary. He said we needed it to run the cows on that much land, but it was also mercy on our horses—and any of us four kids Pa had in the saddle on big cow moves. Even before the purchase moves could take all day, and when it was really hot Pa would tie my ankles to my stirrups in case I fell asleep. But the pastures were all thick rabbit brush leading up to the base of the peaks where we lived, and Pa could spy the calves better from the plane. I never knew why they’d set up a cattle operation this far out, in a county called Wisdom, Montana, or why the Duke’s of the Colleredo family (My grandpa, Pa, and my brother Duke) had such a sweet tooth for stupid. Maybe it was just the fascination of what’s difficult—banking on a spotty satellite phone for their business and maintaining a homemade hydroelectric pump for our whole irrigation system and half dozen naked light bulbs. But I was too young then to think it might have been harder than it was smart. Even my mother had a shady sense of humor about it. She always said, “You know where to find us—when you’re coming down I-29 and you see that sign on your right that says, *Wisdom, This Way! *You just head clear in the other direction. That’s where we’ll be.”

I knew the news about Caleb was eating Lil up. She’d fishtailed the horse trailer down the switchbacks so fast her palms had even forgot to sweat. But her knuckles were white, and her blue eyes were pale in the reflection from the windshield, the shadows of dead mosquitoes falling on her cheeks like freckles. She was the oldest of all of us kids usually acted like it, but now for the first time I’d ever seen, she looked irresolute. As she drove I watched her chest rise and fall, looking right at the spot under her left collarbone where that broken circle was.

“I’m calling P.J.,” Duke said after Lil told him. Our headlights had just come up on them sitting on their saddles in the middle of the road. Duke didn't waste any time, just slapped his mare on her haunches until her hooves banged up into the trailer.

“Pa already did,” Lil said, a little mean. I could tell she’d wanted some sympathy before Duke started scolding her, but it was so typical of him to act like the law. To act like Pa even if he was barely eighteen. But she didn’t dare try and stop him getting involved. He was probably the only one she couldn’t kid about Caleb, because it was Duke, her younger brother, who she’d had to call to haul her back from Knoxville last winter when she finally got up the nerve to leave him. The past few months with her home had been a little strange, in that she was the oldest but Duke treated her like she was even feebler than me, like she couldn’t even be trusted to do anything right after she’d got herself in so deep with Caleb. He was wrong though, Lil was the toughest girl I’d ever met.

“This is the best darn sandwich I ever ate,” Hank said from where he was wedged between me and Lil on the bench seat of the ford. I smiled at Lil, proud of myself.

“Quit ass-kissin, Hank,” Duke said. “These girls in the kitchen are about as useless as tits on a bull.” Lil laughed, but Hank was silent and I felt like I’d been hit in the cheek. Duke was real good at that. Lil must have noticed the little patch of breath on the glass from me sighing out the window.

“Jo wanted to roast you up some pork chops but I wouldn’t let her,” she said heroically, and Duke apologized by wedging my head in his armpit.

Lil wasn’t like Duke. She was tuned to this higher frequency—sensitive to the smallest changes in feedback of fear, anger, help, whatever I was thinking, whatever I needed. She laughed easily, spoke gently, fawned over me always. But it wasn’t just me she loved. She found joy in the simplest things, almost curiously, sedately. Everybody trusted her, begged for her love. Really she was just so forgiving, and everybody it seemed wanted to be forgiven.

Especially Caleb. He’d leaned on Lil the same way I did, worshipped her like she was holy, and she’d had even more faith in him. Maybe that’s why I always liked Caleb. Because if Lil thought his booze hound heart and bad temper were worthy of her love, I did too. What I couldn’t stand was that he’d made her promises, and she’d had to give up on him before he could even keep them. She’d had to come back home and shovel pig shit for her parents and let her teenage brother be her boss at twenty-four, and she was feeling cheated. But he was coming back for her now, I thought. That was why he left Knoxville. I pictured him tearing across the mid-west, Bruce Springsteen in the stereo and Lil on his mind, straightaways, signs like 

You Are Now Leaving Kentucky! *propped up in a cornfield

—*the drama of it all. Man, I thought, that was romance.

When we got back P.J. was in the kitchen. Which looked bad because he wouldn’t have driven the two and a half hours from Wisdom if it wasn’t important. P.J. was the Sheriff, and P.J. was short for Pajama John—called so because the hunting clothes he wore weren’t really camouflage so much as an ugly kaleidoscope-ish print. Like his wife had picked them out of the discount bin at Wal-Mart and sewn them into what looked like a happy matching set of long johns. Everyone in town thought he just walked around in his pajamas with a six-shooter and a bowie knife in his belt.

“I don’t know what y’all just stepped into, but that’s a wanted man,” P.J. said to my mother, who now was awake and boiling a kettle for him in her housecoat. “Went into a bank in Chattanooga with a toy gun and asked for a fair bit of money. Apparently he didn’t dump the tracker they put in his bag ‘till he was ten miles outside of the city. If I was you folks I’d gear up for a hell of a chase. There’s a warrant out for him in Tennessee.”

Frankly my mother seemed more concerned about the Sheriff and his small armory slurping tea in her kitchen at two in the morning. Every so often he would take out his knife and use it to swivel around his tea bag, and Hank watched him with eyes as big as dinner plates. She looked about ready to clock them both.

“Staying the night, P.J.?” Duke said, smiling at Ma.

“Well, now that you mention it, Duke,” P.J. started, looking bashfully at Ma. “That old road has got the axel on my truck sounding like a symphony. Probably best to have a look at it in the daylight before I head back…”

“Well that’s fine by me as long as you can stand to spend a night without your rifle under your pillow,” she said, then looked at Lil, who was paler than parchment. “Big Duke won’t like an alarmist with a loaded weapon under his roof.”

“Alarmist?” P.J. coughed. “Lil’s man is running’ from the law!”

“Dammit, John, quit getting so whipped up. There’s people robbing banks every damn day in this part of the country, and not one of them would be caught dead with a toy pistol,” she said, and walked out of the kitchen.

What I didn’t know then was that there’s nowhere in the country people are robbing banks every day. In fact, nobody’d even gotten away with it in the state of Montana since Butch Cassidy and his boys. And they got shot, eventually. Turns out if you rob a bank anywhere in America there’s a near 98% chance you’ll be caught, tried, and convicted. It’s hard to think of why somebody’d want to with those odds. But I guess either you’re crazy, like the real, looney, cut-your-brain-out-and-stick-you-in-a-pillow-box crazy, or you’re asking for it. For the chase, or for the bullet. I don’t know which one Caleb wanted, but he was asking for it.

After that word came in from P.J. every couple days—a blip to the satellite phone like Morse code. Every time it rang we hovered around the kitchen like we’d have crowded around a television set for a special bulletin, if we’d had one. But despite the news about Caleb creeping in through the telephone, the ranch stayed quiet. Most days it felt like P.J.’s calls were coming from a different time, warning of a doom I believed in even if our little homestead seemed guarded from it by centuries. The wheat colored sky in the afternoon and the sound of voices from acres away seemed indicative of an impenetrable peace, unchanged by any police chase or tragedy hurdling towards it and gaining speed with every mile on Caleb’s odometer.

On Friday we had a thunderstorm. About four o’clock a bolt struck the lightning rod that ran through the middle of our house and out the top like a flagpole. The rod did its job and buried the current right underground, but the kitchen appliances got the worst of it. The toaster had spit sparks and the stove had been trying to light itself ever since. Plus, the hydro pump had shut itself down out of self-preservation when the power went out, and Pa was out trying to get it back on with a hairpin or whatever he used on that homemade machine. Even with all this rain, the runoff that powered the pump was real feeble on account of the draught, and every time the system shut off it stopped diverting water to the lower pastures. Water the cows needed more than we did electricity, so Pa was knee deep in the weir while Ma got the backup generator going. Hank was in the kitchen sliding pots around the floor to catch the leaks.

Duke and Lil were out trying to catch some horses that had spooked and busted through a gate when the lightning hit. When I tried to help Lil made me wait on the fence until they got them in, and the soggy wood was seeping through the butt of my jeans. The lightning flashing orange behind the black clouds, like the very last embers in a cooking fire. Duke cracked the bullwhip behind three loose bays who pivoted and bolted back towards Lil. Their slick coats rippled and steam came off them in the wet dark. She stood her ground at the end of the road waving her arms and hollering as they ran towards her, her boots slipping in the mud as she pushed them in through the gate. Pa came over, wet to his armpits in his waders, and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Come with me kid, it’s about time you learned to fix this thing.”

I followed him back through the pasture he’d come from, the grass so flooded his sunken footsteps were like little ponds. The hydro was surrounded by a chain-link fence, about six feet tall, the gate looped with an open padlock. We went through and climbed up a slippery hill to the top of the weir, which was overflowing with rain water. It was moving so fast the thing looked more like the hoover dam than the weir my dad built from a blueprint when he was twenty-five. A nearby tree had fallen into the sandy pool, its roots loose out of the mud and coiling up like smoke signals, but petrified. Pa stood on the stone edge of the weir near the intake and I watched from the bank.

“Now as you can see Johanna,” he yelled, loud whitewater running over his muck boots. “This rain’s brought down a lot of mud, so I spent the last hours shoveling silt out of here. I think I cleared the trashrack before it pugged up the penstock.” He pointed to a metal pipe running down the hill like a spine—out of the dam and into the cement house where the turbines were. “That’s where the power’s at,” he continued, and my toes shook in empty inches of my oversized rubber boots. “The water gets pressurized in the pipe, and the farther it falls, the more power you can generate. But it’s meant to shut itself off when the power surges. That’s why its all backed up.”

The whole thing seemed a little like a toy, the bolts and pipes all just a little bit bent, water spurting out of crevices and going in all directions. Seeing Pa standing over it he looked like a kid at a science fair. The more he talked the more I could tell how proud he was of it, even if he ended up down here to repair it about every two weeks. I like to think it made him feel smart, being the only one who could. He liked that about it, and I wondered what the hell he was doing showing me how it worked when Little Duke didn’t even have a clue. He walked carefully down the hill, smiling all the way at his creation like he was tending to another one of his children. Come to think of it, it was about the only thing Pa tended to these days, when he wasn’t up in the Plane. But even Little Duke could pilot now and took care of the cows as much as Pa did, and now this seemed like his last way to prove he was useful.

“The cows. They can step on the pipe and crack it, then we’ll all be pissin’ in the wind. Or drinking it to stay alive before I can fix it.”

“Well it sure is pissin’ rain out here Pa. Can we get this thing running already?”

He smiled and I followed him down the hill. The turbines were housed in what looked like a bunker. You had to wrench open a manhole at the top and climb down a ladder to get in. It was a strange quiet in there when it wasn’t running, and the sound of the water outside was soft through the thick concrete. The cold lifted off the cement floor and in through my socks. Water stained the creases of the walls. Pa led me over to a switchbox and had me hold the flashlight, then flipped the switch.

“Shit,” he said, as we stood there in the silence. “Best we give it another shot tomorrow, when daylight’s burning.”

By the time Pa and I got back the backup generator was running and the lights were back on. Duke and Lil walked in next, rain sliding off their noses. For a minute we were silent. Water dripped from the ceiling and the big iron oven clicked as it delivered spark after wasted spark. Duke drummed his fingers on the linoleum counter.

“Well if the oven’s broke, what’s for dinner?”

“Whiskey I guess,” Ma answered from behind the refrigerator where the breaker board was.

Duke knew what to do. He grabbed the bottle from the cabinet and took a swig, smacked his lips and rolled his eyes like he wasn’t quite convinced. “I don’t know Ma, is this whiskey?”

“Let me see that son,” Pa said, hanging his wet felt hat on a hook and taking the bottle. He gulped and paused. “Tastes like a Comanche’s toilet water to me. I don’t know, what do you think, Lil. If anybody can tell the difference, it’s you.” He handed her the bottle and kissed her on the ear. Sometimes he seemed like the only one who treated Lil like she deserved. Like he was glad to have her back and didn’t see her marriage as leaving the rest of us to rot, like I think Duke did.

“Please,” she said, her face smiling and stinging all at once. “That’s plain WD40!”

“Jeez, Lil, times are hard but there are easier ways to go,” Duke teased. Lil punched him.

It always made me a little mad, watching Lil laugh at Duke’s jokes. He could just unglue her at his mercy, and she’d forget that most of her day was spent working for him, making him sandwiches and scrubbing the pots he ate his grits from. It was like he used joy as a weapon. He knew so perfectly well how to give it to her, yet often did not.

“I’ll tell you if it’s whiskey,” Ma beckoned and took her taste. Then, shaking her head, “you kids, that’s nothin’ but tap water.”

“What a woman,” Pa squeezed her, while Duke took the bottle and looked at me.

“What do you think, Jo? Is this whiskey?”

I’d always imagined when it was my turn I’d just purse my lips and act tough like Ma, say something like, 

tastes like maple syrup to me! I’d even put it on my pancakes.

 But I’d never been allowed to play. Usually Hank and I would just watch and pretend like we were in on the joke, our guts green with envy because they weren’t full of whiskey. I looked to my mother first for approval before lifting it to my lips.

Everybody in the kitchen was just about splitting their kidneys laughing while I tried to regurgitate the liquor, but before I could even get my eyes un-blurred, the phone rang.

“Lil,” Ma held out the receiver, her face suddenly like a cinderblock. In the stillness the skillets swayed from their hooks above her head, while the rest of us silently breathed out bourbon. “It’s P.J. I think you oughtta hear this.”

“That sounds like Caleb” was all Lil said, then she hung up and walked out the screen door.

“What’s the latest, Ma?” Little Duke slid down from his place on the kitchen counter. I went to follow Lil, not caring if he’d robbed every bank between here and Tennessee, I wasn’t about to let her give up on him now.

“Said they spotted Caleb at a place called the River Port Casino outside Baton Rouge, with a woman.”

“If she isn’t, I’m not,” Ma said coolly.

“She is she just won’t admit it. She’s just actin like she’s as wised up to that idiot as she should be but she ain’t. You never should have let her marry that son of a bitch.”

“One day, Duke, you’ll have a daughter and she’ll listen to you about as good as your mustang. That’s the secret about having kids. They’re gonna act stupid no matter what, your job is just to make them feel a little better about it.”

“—especially when you didn’t see him that night. Because I was the one who drove a thousand goddamn miles to get her when Caleb was on his fourth pint and Lil was on her last legs. You don’t know the half of it.”

“Oh yeah? You know when Lil used to call from Knoxville—back when they first got married—that she’d be calling you from the inside of that asshole’s Silverado? That on the nights he got real drunk she’d walk out to the driveway to lock herself in the truck ‘cause she was scared. That some mornings she’d wake up to him tapping on the driver’s side where she’d fallen asleep, because he needed the car to drive the woman home from the night before.”

“Sure you knew he was a drunk, but so is half of Montana. For god’s sake so is Pa and everybody else we know. But you don’t know the half of it.”

Ma grabbed the bottle of whiskey from the counter and smashed it in the sink before I could flinch.

“Get out and make sure that damn gate is still on its hinges. If the horses are out again you won’t get dinner ‘till morning.”

The broken glass scraped the aluminum as it settled in the sink and I wedged through the door out onto the porch. I couldn’t tell if Ma was angrier about what she’d just heard or the fact that Duke had called Pa a drunk. I’d certainly never heard anyone say it before.

Lil was hanging the laundry. It had stopped raining but the sky was dark and the white sheets looked grey behind her blonde hair—the strands around her face were kicked up by the weather and sticking to her mouth and eyelashes like static. She looked right at me and hung up a comforter so all I could see of her were the ankles of her blue jeans. I didn’t have my shoes on, and the splinters of the porch grazed my toes, but I didn’t go inside. I watched her move along the line, the damp linen walls clinging to her like velvet, and could see she was aching but wasn’t proud. Because I knew it wasn’t the warrant out for his arrest, and it wasn’t even the other woman—it was that he’d taken the turn south, and Louisiana was in the wrong direction. That despite all of it, the worst part was that he wasn’t coming for her.

The next day Lil didn’t get out of bed. At breakfast her hot cereal steamed at the place next to mine, and stayed there lit up by the late-morning light as we cleared the table. Nobody said a word about it and Ma who’d have made a dead horse work, just started bringing meals to her so they didn’t keep getting cold at the table. Everybody forgave her, almost more out of loyalty than commiseration. Even Duke didn’t complain when it took twice as long to do the dishes without her, and he expected me to do the same when he asked me to clean out the grease trap, because it was Lil’s turn.

But I was mad as hell about it. Nobody got a day off unless it was Christmas, and that grease trap under the sink looked like a cauldron and smelled worse than the time we found a dead packrat in the wall. It took me the better part of two hours to clean it; I had to skim off the solids into trash bags, then get the shop vacuum and suck all the black water. Down there was all the things once stuck to the plates I’d washed every day for the last six weeks, every smear of mayonnaise and sliver of bacon fat and flap of chicken skin I thought I’d never see again floated on that black water. Even the sage Duke tucked inside in the handkerchief over my nose didn’t cut the smell.

After I’d finished I ran up the stairs to Lil’s room, ready to chew her out, ask where she got off expecting so damn much of everybody while she spent the afternoon moaning in her bedroom. And over some guy who’d have married a bottle of bourbon if it looked half as good in a dress. But every hot thought in my head was snuffed out the minute I opened the door.

Inside the room was dark in a way that still reminded you it was daytime, with the edges of the windows glowing behind the shades like neon. It smelled stale like warm breath and I felt simultaneously on the verge of tears and like I’d forgotten something very important. I swallowed to keep my stomach out of my esophagus. I didn’t want to ask how she was feeling, because it wasn’t hard to guess. I just got into bed with her and we both fell asleep on the same pillow, right there in the middle of the afternoon.

Summer 2016

Fiction

My Sister in Love

Zoe was standing at the valet trying to bum a cigarette off Vince. She’d just gotten off work and it was pouring, but Beverly Hills was even more beautiful in the rain. In the dark the yellow headlights glinted off Sunset Boulevard like a shining warped record. Vince was leaning with his back against the valet booth not paying much attention to Zoe, probably because he knew she really was just after the nicotine and wasn’t even flirting with him. But Zoe wasn’t shy about asking for favors, and she knew Vince liked that about her. He straightened his bowtie and pulled out a pack of Parliaments. Wet palm fronds whacked the pink stucco of the hotel.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said, grateful she’d had time to change out of her pool attendant uniform. Augie Borman was walking out of the hotel, his leather shoes squishing into the soaked red valet mat. He looked rich.

“You’re staying here?” he asked, a little nervous.

“No, I was uh, just seeing a friend,” she answered. Vince looked up and raised his eyebrows.

“Would you like a cab, Miss?” Vince said, putting on his best Beverly Hills Hotel parking attendant smile, sort of enjoying this. Zoe didn’t mind. As long as she could make it back to the staff parking lot with her pride intact.

“Yes, we would,” Augie answered. And before Zoe could refuse a taxi was pulling up under the awning. Augie was relaxed now, a look on his face like he knew he didn’t have to ask.

Zoe’s mouth tasted like a metal sink. The sugar from last night’s liquor was still on her molars like moss. Fuck tequila. Fuck Calamity Jane’s and their three-dollar-shot-and-a-beer Fridays, and fuck Jane for opening a place too ugly to stay sober in. The bar’s only redeeming quality was a signed poster of Robert Duvall on the back wall. Zoe’s picture was there too, still on the big mirror collaged with about sixty other fake IDs. Jane called it “The Yearbook”—an archive of underage, oversold Encino High school kids. For years it was like a shrine Zoe couldn’t wait to get her picture on—only now, a decade later with her old fake up there next to kids she’d babysat, it seemed like a sick joke. She remembered handing hers over to Jane bashfully—gleefully—the day she turned twenty-one.She thought it was the baddest thing she’d ever do.

Next to her picture was Augie’s, of course, a picture they’d taken in front of the white plaster wall of her garage because they’d been too scared to go to the post office. They were seventeen at the time, and right after that picture was taken they’d had sex in her backyard, right there on the lawn in the middle of the day. She hadn’t seen Augie since the summer after her junior year in college, until he walked out of the hotel last night. Now she was in a bed with mascara on the pillows and a twenty-seven-year-old man next to her she hardly knew.

She rolled over and lifted Augie’s arm from her collarbone. The skin on his shoulder was creased from the sheets, the kind of stamp you only get from passing out real drunk—with that extra pound of booze pressing you into the mattress. A fancy mattress. And a nice room too, she thought as she looked around at the swollen furniture and the uncorked champagne. She wondered just how lucky a kid form Encino had to be to end up on this side of Mulholland. Investment banking, he’d said, to explain the suit.

Zoe wasn’t easy, just easily convinced. Last night the two of them had looked longingly at their pictures on the wall at Jane’s, like a sappy scene out of St. Elmo’s Fire. He’d been so good at being a teenager—had all the best parts of the cliché: this backwards-hat-wearing, big-brother’s-car-driving, semi-fuck up that was actually really nice to his mom. Only now looking at him and the streak of dried drool flaking off his chin, he was practically a stranger, and she was late for work. She searched the perimeter of the bed and found her bra by her feet. Her white Chuck Taylors were piled in the hall, spattered with bar slime and looking like old bones against the creamy pink carpet. She picked them up on her walk to the door and took a last look at Augie, flipped the 

 sign swinging from the handle, and walked out the door.

Still barefoot, Zoe stepped into the elevator and hit “B.” Her stomach lurched as the car plummeted down and the carnival wallpaper looked like it was sliding off the walls. She decided there was probably nothing worse for a hangover than green and white pinstripes—except maybe the basement. The doors opened into a fluorescent cavern of employees all in white cotton, echoing down the checkered hallways like the bottom of a swimming pool. Zoe opened her locker and grabbed the sea-foam trimmed B.H.H. uniform lying in a petrified lump at the bottom, shook it out and gave it a hit of perfume. Molly walked by just in time to see Zoe’s face buried in the pits of her polo shirt.

“You hate to see that,” she laughed as she spun the dial on the locker next to Zoe’s.

“Shut up. My washing machine is fucked. It doesn’t actually clean anything it just like, re-allocates all the dirt evenly between my clothes.”

“Oh, so we’re actually pretending you’ve been home since last night?”

“Did he write his number on the napkin or the receipt?”

“Suite,” Zoe smiled. “Eighteenth floor.”

“Lame. You haven’t pulled a Bungalow since that Swedish producer last year. Where’d you find him? Pool deck or Polo Lounge?”

 God Zoe, I didn’t know it was possible to get homesick for an Encino subdivision.”

“Not like we’ve come that far, Molls.”

“Speak for yourself, I checked in Lindsay Lohan yesterday—not even kidding, she had coke under her fingernails when she signed the guest register.” Molly pulled her eyelid down in front of a tiny mirror, then ran a black pencil over it a couple times. “Wait, you met this guy at Calamity Jane’s and he’s staying 

“You’re gonna need a better excuse than that if Bill catches you coming out of his room.”

“No, but he knows about the NFL player from a couple weeks ago.”

“A hundred-dollar bill for an eighteen-dollar drink? If you insist on sleeping with guests at least tell them not to tip you. Even Bill’s not that stupid.”

“Then I’d stay the fuck away from the eighteenth floor,” Molly slammed her locker. “And I think Bill’s gonna pull you from the pool for the wedding anyway. He’s got like, a third of guest services on it.”

“Jesus. I need a shower or this tequila’s gonna burn a hole in my clothes. Where’s Mel?”

“Just started on the bungalows, I think.”

Zoe ambushed Mel tapping on the door to Bungalow Seven.

“Please, Mel. Please, please, please.” Zoe grabbed both Mel’s hands and knelt on the concrete mock prayer, “It’s an emergency.” Zoe had known Mel since she first got the job right out of college, and the list of favors she’d done for Zoe was longer than the turn down checklist. When Zoe’s landlord had upped her rent last year Mel started picking up leftovers from the room service trays and putting them in a lunchbox in Zoe’s locker. She was like the patron saint of mangled steak and gravy-stained potato skins—Zoe had survived on her charity for two months until her promotion to the pool desk.

, Zoe, not this one! Wait an hour. When I’m done with the bungalows I’ll let you in to a suite on the third floor. Some people checked out this morning.”

“I don’t have an hour Mel, my ass is on the line.”

“Mine too Zoe, but it wouldn’t be if you stopped whoring yours around.”

Zoe dropped Mel’s hands and got up off the ground. Her knees were printed with concrete grit and skin on her legs looked translucent. She wondered if her face looked the same. She hadn’t even looked in a mirror today, but she could guess.

“You’re right.” Zoe said, wishing Mel would stop looking so sorry. “I made my bed.” She laughed at her own joke, and started to walk away, but Mel grabbed her arm.

 make the beds. I’ll give you fifteen minutes, but you have to do the bathroom.”

Zoe turned, kissed Mel right on the face and ran inside.

The woman staying in Bungalow Seven had left her hair stuck to the marble wall of the shower. She fed them down the drain before using the woman’s shampoo, the ingredients to which were all in French. Zoe thought about what someone this loaded must put in her hair, and imagined it was made of something like quinoa and kitten tears. She got out and put her dirty uniform back on, then got to work. She started with the tub, the mirrors, and the faucets, slathering the room with enough Comet to kill an animal. The chemical-blue crystals bubbled against the polished hardware, almost offensively—like the rooms here were so nice they made the cleaning products look bad. The “his and hers” sinks were next, but when she got to hers she paused. It was populated like a tiny city, glass bottles and opaque jars edging the bowl like the turrets of a skyline. The pink glow coming off the walls made them look like a castle at twilight.

Zoe had never thought of herself as very girly. In fact, she sort of claimed it as part of her appeal. She was the chick who smoked weed and always knew who was pitching for the dodgers that night. To her, sexy was a strategically ripped t-shirt and a lot of eyeliner. The beveled glass museum in front of her was so foreign it looked like a music video. But she wanted it. Wanted it in the way she’d wanted to be Britney Spears when “Toxic” hit VH1. Or the way a fourteen-year-old girl wants to live in a Pottery Barn Teen catalogue. She’d never wanted anything so bad in her life. Just below the mirror’s gold leaf frame she saw a skinny rectangle of perfume, the grown up kind that wasn’t clear but a dark dusty color, and picked it up. For a second she pretended it was hers, and that she was the adult she really should have been now—the kind that didn’t wash her underwear in the bathtub because she had a washing machine that worked and a job that didn’t involve handling other people’s laundry. She put a little on her wrist and the oil felt cool as it dried, cool and clean. Only wearing it, she couldn’t help but feel dirty.

She wondered what time Augie’s flight left. If it was a red-eye she might get a free minute to knock on his door before he left for the airport. Then immediately she wanted to slap herself. Stay the fuck away from the eighteenth floor. Since when was keeping her job less important than a kid who at the moment was probably drinking a Bloody Mary in first class 40,000 feet above her head? She was just slipping though—into that same state of needing him, the comfortable worn-in kind, the old relationship that still fit her so well. But she wasn’t going to do it. She wasn’t going to end up in his room again and manage not to mention she worked there. She wasn’t going to walk up to her apartment that night to find him sitting on the concrete step, tortured enough by prospect of leaving her to miss his flight. She wasn’t going to smell like Chanel when he kissed her.

She was replacing the bathrobes when something caught her eye. It was the towels. They’d been used, clearly—you could tell because the grain of the fabric looked disheveled and kind of starched, like running your hand over velvet the wrong way. But they were folded. And not just folded like any normal person would, like the *maid *would. First the bath towel, folded in thirds, then the hand towel just a little off center to the left, and the washcloth on top of both folded in a triangle with the B.H.H. monogram facing out. It was textbook. She looked back at the sinks, the “his” side découpaged with a million shards of facial hair, but the towels were impeccable.

Who were these guys trying to impress? As if they thought housekeeping might appreciate the gesture. Maybe it was a Beverly Hills guilty privilege thing—though she didn’t have any other evidence to believe that existed. Not only are we rich and pay two-thousand dollars a night for this bungalow, but we’re also neat and have nice manners, too. It was this illusion of perfection even when it didn’t matter, like they were soliciting approval, 

She thought of herself at twenty-two, that summer after junior year, standing in her driveway the third week in June. It was a hundred and two degrees in Encino and she could feel the exhaust coming off Augie’s hatchback as it crept up the curb.

“Where’s the BMW?” he asked, sweating and paler than she remembered, but she didn’t care. He meant her dad’s 1974 convertible that he’d owned since before her parents were married. He never drove it, but it had always been parked in the driveway like the fanciest damn lawn ornament in the whole development. He probably could have sold it and fixed up his whole mortgage. Or his marriage.

“Well my dad moved out,” she’d said. “It’s just about the only thing he took with him.” She was going for tough but it just came out sounding cheap.

“You should have called,” she said. The last time they’d spoken was a few weeks after Christmas. In the intervals between midterms and spring break and the guys at Cal State Irvine she’d let sleep over but never buy her breakfast, she and Augie always came home to each other. Her mom would make him sandwiches and her little brother would beg him to play Nintendo. After, they’d go down to the convenient store on Ventura and pick up Micheladas in tall cans, and Augie might rev his engine at a red light for the occasional drag race he knew she hated. Then they’d end up driving Malibu canyon to the old dam, like they were Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty making out in the first scene of Splendor in The Grass, before everything went south. They’d listen to old mix CDs and talk in absolutes, like, 

. Maybe they were just enchanted that they had something to be nostalgic about, like they were the exception to the rule about high school sweethearts, or there was still something romantic about being old-fashioned. But when he’d stopped returning her calls it didn’t take her long to start picturing the girl on the east coast with the manicure and the vocabulary she didn’t have. She already knew, now she just wanted him to know she did. “The least you could have done was let me down easy.”

“I don’t know what to say.” He wouldn’t apologize.

“Really? Nothing? No elaborate excuse?”

If there was one, she wanted to hear it. If there was any way this could end up with the two of them back in the front seat of his car and her forgiving him when she knew she shouldn’t, she wanted it to. But he didn’t want to be forgiven. He didn’t want her back.

“At least my dad had the courtesy to make something up.”

The thing was, she hadn’t even been that broken up about her dad. Her parents had been happily married, like 

, her whole adolescent life. If they hated each other she hadn’t noticed. They’d been faithful for the most part, except for maybe the odd dating site she’d catch on her dad’s internet browser every once in a while—and god after thirty-five years and two kids out of high school who could blame them. They’d just sort of fallen less in love and more into friendship. He still came over for spaghetti on Mondays, and it honestly seemed like more work to complain about it than to forgive them.

Instead Zoe kicked the blinding pavement of her driveway and gave a convincing performance, soliciting Augie’s sympathy for as long as she could stand. Because it sounded better to be pissed off. Because even if it was good enough for her parents, good enough for their daughter, good enough to maintain a semi-functional family—it’d never be good enough for her. She had to tell Augie that. Because the girl he wanted would never let that happen to her.

Back in the bungalow she touched the towels, then pulled them down and chucked them into the hamper. Dismantling the farce in front of her until it was just more dirty laundry. She almost wanted to scour them for stains, find proof of flawed human existence. *Just leave your fucking towel on the floor! *She wanted to yell. *Just give me that! *But how could she expect that kind of honesty when she wasn’t capable of it either. She just spent her life conflating herself with the person she’d rehearsed for so long. Pretending to be someone similar to herself, but marginally better, or at least marginally more interesting. She didn’t know why she did it. Why she felt like the truth wasn’t good enough even if it was just shy of the lie, or why some people just make us feel like we have something to prove.

“Zoe!” Mel called from the bedroom. “It’s quarter to nine!”

“Shit,” Zoe muttered. She took one last dramatic sigh and called to Mel in her best Gloria Swanson, “Yes Mr. Demille! I’m ready for my close-up!” Then she pushed open the door of the bathroom with the laundry cart and let it roll right into Mel’s hands as she slid out from behind it.

, beautiful, I owe you one!” Zoe called out behind her as she walked down the path towards the pool.

Growing up, Zoe thought Beverly Hills was the most beautiful place on earth. It was like an island in Los Angeles, full of sprinklers and iced tea rattling inside thick pint glasses with lemon wedges. The marine layer of fog never inched over Rodeo Drive, the line where the humidity ended was so stark it looked like a Jetstream against the blue sky, held off by the force of fifteen thousand air conditioners. She felt like she’d spent so much of her life just crawling over the desert mountains behind it, slinking down Mulholland highway like one of the coyotes always getting caught in somebody’s backyard at four A.M., flea ridden and drinking from the pool. Public hours didn’t exist in this town. It was a town of gym memberships and standing reservations at Spago for *that corner table under the old Tiffany lamp, you know the one I like, Maurizio. *So she’d gotten a job at the hotel. Started at ground zero. After all, the city was built around it, indebted to it. She’d once seen a girl at the Polo Lounge with the banana leaf wallpaper printed on her fingernails. Sure, Zoe wasn’t a guest, but working the pool desk she could still walk across the wet cement and smell the chlorine on a hot day, still watch the Sunday newspaper sheaths float down from the opaque glass of a patio table and pretend Faye Dunaway was camped out behind them, looking slightly bored in a plastic chair and a satin morning coat.

Bill was waiting for her at the pool desk.

“Zoe,” he said. “You’re late. And that’s not the only reason you’re on my shit list today.”

“If I catch you draining somebody’s Mai Tai glass again before it gets back to the bar, I’ll fire you faster than you can say Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“And get a clean pair of tennis shoes. I have you working a wedding today and those look like they just went to Warped Tour.”

Bill turned to go and Zoe backed away slowly, circling the pool like a fly around a carnivorous plant.

“You’re on thin ice, dude,” Vince said, walking up behind her.

“So you didn’t come back with that guy last night?”

“He’s probably checked out by now,” Zoe said longingly.

“Bill’s not the point. The douchebag with the cash sticking out of his fly is the point.”

Zoe didn’t say anything, but she could tell there was something more concerned in Vince’s voice than just 

“You think you're fooling him because he doesn't know you work here?” Vince asked. “Because you're not. Seriously Zoe, you let these guys order you up like room service. And if you don't see that the only one you're fooling is yourself."

“What’s your problem, Vince? You don't know anything about him. And I could have told him I worked here, you don’t know I didn’t.”

“Well then any guy who screws you and pays you to clean his toilet is a rat.”

“Fuck you, I’m not a maid. And he’s not a rat.”

“No,” Vince said, seeing that he’d hurt her feelings. “He's like that thing, what do you call it? Like when all the rats get their tails tangled together and they become this giant, single organism, mutant rat? That thing. All these guys you bang? They’re that."

The ballroom looked like the happiest funeral Zoe had ever seen. White roses were knitted together on every piece of furniture, rounding out any hard edge so that the whole place looked like a down comforter, pillowed with petals. Even the chandelier was made out of white glass roses, suspended from the ceiling like a floating grave mound and lit up with a couple thousand watts to be the color of toothpaste.

But for some reason she couldn't pretend to be that bitter. Sure, it was gaudy, and all the fluffy white upholstery looked like one of those padded rooms in an insane asylum, but underneath all the iridescent linens was still the old hotel she loved, the gleaming brass sconces, the deco floor. Who wouldn't want to get married in the same hotel as Elizabeth Taylor? Zoe had never let herself picture it without someone to picture it with, but last night with Augie had felt like fate. Like the last decade without him had been in slow motion, still living in seventeen, and the last twenty-four hours had just accelerated her into the adult she'd been veering away from like a negative charge. She felt ready now. They could show their kids graduation pictures, and when people asked about their twenties they'd call them the “lost years,” before they found each other again. They could be eighty and he'd still have a memory of her on the lawn in Encino, young and sweating in the California heat, her arms tan and grass stains on her jeans.

Zoe watched the wedding cake as a waiter rolled it back behind one of the dense white ruched curtains. Fondant rose blooms obscured its shape like white plaster.

“What’s with the grin, Zoe? You drunk?” Molly caught her as she walked by.

“Oh god, are you kidding? This whole thing is pathetic,” she lied. “If I ever decide to get married, will you put a Percocet in my drink? I’d like to be fooled into thinking it was actually making me happy.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Zoe.” Molly paused. “You’d need more than oxy to have any fun.”

It was about a half hour before the reception and Zoe had spent most of the morning just polishing silverware. Each place setting had more utensils than she had in her whole cutlery drawer. Now she was pinning extra petals to the centerpiece on table five when she noticed a place card that looked familiar. 

. What was Nick Melvoin from her eleventh grade trig class doing at a wedding at the Beverly Hills Hotel?

She suddenly felt like her legs were being shredded with a cheese grater.

Frankie Zwick

Frankie Zwick

Fiction

Summer 2016

My Sister in Love

Spring 2016

Room Service