“Wait a minute,” Simon Robbie said. “I need to ask you a favor.”
“I’m not much for favors.”
“Please?” he said. “It’s important, and I’ll buy you dinner. I’ll buy you dinner tonight and for the next week.”
“That’s a lot of egg rolls.”
“It doesn’t have to be here,” he said, nearly pleading.
“Okay, what is it?” I asked.
“It’s my mother. She’s always after me about a girlfriend, every time I see her. If you could just come over with me, even for ten minutes, pretend that we’re on a date, it would shut her up for a least a few weeks. Please?”
“You want me to pretend I’m your girlfriend?” I said. I’d forgotten that I was Zoe, and my tone was incredulous and unkind.
He nodded. Stacy put down the check and he counted out the cash, then looked at me with puppy-dog eyes.
“I only live five minutes away,” he said.
I wondered if he cruised the Chinese restaurants in this neighborhood each night, the pizza joints, the Greek diners, looking for a girl who seemed willing to impersonate a girlfriend, if he knew I’d made up Zoe and her cell phone traumas and could tell I was practiced in the immorality of lying. I wondered if he’d give me cash, or if I’d actually have to eat dinner with him every night. Would it be nice to have someone to eat dinner with, or horrible? I had no idea. I was staring at his yellow Little League T-shirt, seeing how it was smudged and smeared with enigmatic stains, and it suddenly occurred to me that he might not be a hipster at all, that it might be a T-shirt from his own long-ago team. It was the saddest thought I’d had all day.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We walked for a few minutes in silence, past a skateboard park and a theater where a movie was just letting out. Simon Robbie sauntered along with his hands in his pockets, pushing his cords even farther down his hips, his mouth pursed as he whistled some kind of tune. I almost reached into my bag for my cigarettes, but then realized Zoe wasn’t the kind of girl who smoked. It was important to stay in character no matter what events might unfold. After a few blocks he took my elbow, very gentlemanly, and tugged me down a side street packed tight with little run-down houses. There were no streetlights and the place was dark and deserted. At another time of my life, I might have been scared. But Simon Robbie didn’t look very strong; his arms were stringy and thin. I figured I could take him if I had to.
“Here we are,” he said, guiding me up the steps of a white house. In the front windows sat three or four cats, their yellow and green eyes blinking out into the night. When he opened the door I was greeted by an overwhelming smell of detergents and ammonia and room fresheners. It was like being hit over the head with a bowl of potpourri.
“Mom?” he called as we walked in, and the cats turned to look at us, crouching down in defensive positions. The living room, as you might expect, was exceptionally clean, with a couch and a television and a round rug made of rags, and everything except the rug was glistening. On the coffee table, magazines were stacked in neat, geometric rows.
A woman came in, smiling. She was younger than I’d expected, with short, neat brown hair and friendly brown eyes. I’d been picturing some kind of dragon lady, and I let out a relieved breath. Simon Robbie was still holding me by my elbow, as if I were a pet he’d led home on a leash. I stepped away and clasped my arms behind my back.
“Mom, I want you to meet Zoe,” he said.
“Hey there,” his mother said, still smiling. “Great to meet you. Have a seat. Would you like a drink, maybe some lemonade, or a glass of wine? Sit down, please, let’s get comfortable.”
I glanced at Simon Robbie, who looked like he was about to break into a sweat. I couldn’t figure out what about this woman was so terrible. I sat down across from the mother, and he sat down next to me. We were on a kind of love seat, and she was in a recliner. The cats relaxed and resumed their vigilant stares at the outer dark.
“Zoe,” his mother said, “that’s such a beautiful name.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I was named for a character in a children’s book.”
“Really? Which one?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My mother chose the name, but she died when I was young, and my father didn’t know which book it was.”
“And you never tried to find out? A good library—”
“Of course I’ve tried,” I said, cutting her off. “But no luck.” I leaned back in my seat, pleased with how things were going so far.
“You’d think that if you cared enough you wouldn’t let the issue drop,” the woman said. “About your dead mother, that is.”
I looked at Simon Robbie. I was starting to get a sense of what he was grappling with. But I had an advantage: Zoe’s mother wasn’t real. “Maybe so,” I said, smiling wistfully at the carpet, as if long-held grief was welling up inside me.
Simon Robbie put his hand on my elbow again, maybe to comfort me, or possibly himself. Sitting next to me on the couch he exuded a faint, clammy smell of nerves mixed with the residual odor of scallion pie.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some lemonade?” his mother said, and the pressure on my elbow intensified.
“Sure, why not?” I said. It was the wrong answer. The lemonade was made from a mix, using all the wrong proportions. It was thick and sludgy with particles and so sweet that one sip made my teeth call out in protest. The woman across from me smiled as I set the glass down on a coaster. I was starting to think that this was some kind of demonic ritual practiced by the two of them, that she was a sorceress who demanded her son bring home victims for her to torment. On the other hand, maybe she just didn’t know how to make lemonade.
“Delicious,” I told her.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, and crossed her legs. One of the cats came over and jumped up in her lap. She didn’t pet it or anything, just let it settle itself on her thighs.
“Zoe’s an actress, Mom,” Simon Robbie said.
“How wonderful! What do you act?”
“Funny, that’s exactly what he asked,” I said, gesturing at him companionably.
“Well, it’s a logical question, isn’t it?”
I was going to explain my confusion, but decided to let it drop. “Mostly commercials,” I said.
“Oh, I love commercials!” she said. “Some of them are so clever these days. They tell a whole story in under thirty seconds. They have this wonderful”—here she snapped her fingers, looking for a word, and the cat jumped down and rubbed itself against my legs—“economy.”
“That’s true, I guess,” I said.
“Show me one.”
“What’s that?”
She gestured at me, commandingly, like a queen. “Act one out. Please?”
I glanced at Simon Robbie but he was staring at the ground. Then I reminded myself that I was still Zoe, not me, though by this stage the lines were getting blurred. I thought about my last callback, for a car dealership. They went with a taller woman in the end, my agent said; I looked too small next to the trucks.
Standing up in that clean, heavily scented room. I motioned at the love seat behind me as if it were a gleaming 4 x 4. “Come on down to the lot at Ed’s Car and Truck!” I said loudly, smiling to show as many teeth as I possibly could. “We’re practically giving away our inventory of quality preowned vehicles, with no money down and delayed interest payments for up to a year! These deals won’t last, so visit us now! At Ed’s, we’re not just your dealer, we’re your friends!”