Last Call on Lot 7

Dottie punched in at the gate at ten minutes to nine and the guard booth smelled like old coffee, the same as every other night shift she had covered on Lot 7. She hung her jacket on the hook and looked at the sign-in sheet. Her birthday. Thirty-three.

She had not told anyone at work. She had told Nichole a few days ago, in the way you tell somebody, offhand, not a big deal, and Nichole had gone quiet in that way that meant it was going to be a big deal after all.

"Please don't do anything," Dottie had said.

"I'm not doing anything," Nichole said.

"You're doing something. I can hear your face."

"I'm not doing anything. Go to work."

That had been Tuesday. Now it was Friday, and Dottie figured whatever Nichole was not doing would happen Saturday, at home, with a cake from the place on Fairfax and probably balloons, and Dottie would pretend to be surprised and it would be nice and fine.

Thirty-three felt like a weird number. Not a round one. Not one anyone made a fuss over. But she had noticed lately that birthdays had changed shape for her. When she was twenty-two they felt like arrivals. Look, I made it to here. Now they felt more like departures. A train leaving a platform she had meant to stand on longer. A deadline, almost. Another year where she had not done the things she was supposed to have done by now, the house, the ring, the plan, whatever it was people her age were supposed to have, and she thought, you know, you can waste a whole shift thinking like that, so she clipped her flashlight on and started the first loop.

The night shift on Lot 7 was easy and it was lonely. Lots 1 through 5 were the active ones, the soundstages with their red lights, but Lot 7 was the old backlot, the one the studio kept meaning to demolish and never did. It had a Western street, a fake saloon, a fake bank, a fake church with no back wall. Everything was facades. If you stepped behind any building on the street you were just standing in dirt and cable spools.

She walked the street at her usual slow pace, boots on the boards, and it was dead quiet the way it always was. In daylight the street looked cheap. At night, under the work lights they left on for the maintenance crews, it looked like something. She had always liked it. She had liked it even before Nichole started working weekends out here, sewing in the prop shed for the indie jobs that paid her in mostly money and occasionally leftovers.

That was when she saw it. The prop shed, halfway down the alley between the saloon and the stable, had a light on. That was not strange by itself. Nichole worked late when a deadline was eating her. But there was more than one light. There was a warm string of them, the fairy-light kind, glowing through the shed's one dusty window, and Dottie stood in the middle of the fake street and felt her stomach do something.

"Okay," she said out loud, to nobody. "Okay."

She walked down the alley and the shed door was open a few inches. She could hear music, something low, a record Nichole liked. She pushed the door with two fingers.

The shed had been transformed. That was the only word for it. Fairy lights everywhere, strung along the shelves and draped over the fabric bolts and around the old chaise lounge that lived in the corner and never got used. On the floor, a picnic blanket, red and white, flat and neat. On the blanket, takeout containers, still steaming, from Guadalajara's, which was her favorite taco spot in the whole city and which Nichole always said was too far to drive for dinner and had clearly driven for dinner. There was a six-pack of the good beer. There were two folded paper bags from a bakery, taped shut, with a note on top that said DO NOT PEEK, which was very Nichole.

And there was Nichole, thirty-one years old, sitting cross-legged on the blanket in her paint-stained overalls, holding a single balloon on a string like she was not sure she was allowed to keep it.

"Happy birthday," Nichole said.

"You said you weren't doing anything."

"I wasn't. This isn't anything. This is just a taco situation."

Dottie laughed, and it came out bigger than she meant it to, and she had to wipe her face with her sleeve. "You drove to Fairfax."

"I drove to Fairfax. On a Friday. In traffic. You owe me."

"The balloon."

"The balloon was free. A kid at the party supply place gave it to me. I think he felt bad for me, I looked like I was gonna cry over a balloon."

"Why are you gonna cry over a balloon?"

"Because it's your birthday and you told me not to do anything and you're covering a shift on it and that's sad, Dottie. That's genuinely sad. So I did nothing, but I did it here."

Dottie came in and sat down on the blanket. Her knees cracked. Thirty-three.

"Okay, so, before you eat," Nichole said, and she picked up her phone and set it face down by the sewing machine. "No phones. I know you're technically working. If somebody calls, you go be security, and I will sit here and guard your tacos with my life."

"They'll survive."

"Shut up and eat. You have forty minutes before your next loop, I memorized your route, don't look at me like that, you told me your route like four times in two years."

Dottie opened the first container. Carnitas, the way she got them, extra salsa on the side because she did not trust anyone's salsa judgment but her own. Nichole had gotten it right. "You got the salsa on the side."

"I fear your salsa opinions, yes. Everyone does."

They ate, and the record played, and the fairy lights did this little flicker thing whenever the shed air conditioner kicked on. It was, Dottie had to admit, a very good nothing. It was exactly the kind of birthday she would have planned for herself, if she had ever planned one, which she had not since she turned twenty-five and decided birthdays were for other people.

"I used to make a big deal of them," she said, around a taco. "When I was younger. Twenty-one, twenty-two, I had a list every year. Things I'd do by the next one."

"Did you do them?"

"Some. Then I stopped making lists."

Nichole set her taco down. "Why?"

"I don't know. They started feeling like bills. Like every year the list got longer and I'd done less and it stopped being fun. It started feeling like proof I was behind."

"Behind on what? Says who?"

"Says everybody. Says the whole thing." Dottie shrugged. "You're thirty-one, you get it. You hit thirty and suddenly everyone's asking what's next and the answer's supposed to be a house or a baby or a ring and if it's not, they look at you like you're stalled out."

Nichole was quiet a second. The record hissed.

"What's your answer?" Nichole asked. "What's next, for you?"

"You really want to do this on my birthday?"

"I really want to do this on your birthday. It's the one night a year you're allowed to talk about yourself. I checked the rules."

Dottie looked at her taco. She looked at the fairy lights. The honest answer was sitting right there and she had been not saying it for about a year, and she knew Nichole knew, because Nichole knew everything, it was honestly annoying.

"There's something I've been wanting to say," Dottie said. "For a while."

Nichole put her taco down all the way and turned to face her, cross-legged, hands in her lap, and waited. She was good at waiting. It was one of the first things Dottie had loved about her, back at that art opening two years ago, when Dottie was thirty-one and rambling about a painting and Nichole just stood there and let her finish.

"I'm listening," Nichole said.

Dottie wiped her hands on the napkin. She bought time with the beer, one long swallow, then another. The bottle was almost empty and she wished it were fuller.

"You know how we do the same thing every week," she said. "Tuesday is your studio night. Thursday I cook. Saturday we do laundry and you watch that dumb show about the boat people."

"Below Deck is not dumb."

"Sunday we drive to your mom's. Every week. Same week, on a loop, like one of my patrols." Dottie turned the empty bottle in her hand. "I love it. That's the thing. I love it so much I could do it forever, and some nights that scares the hell out of me."

"Scares you how?"

"Because forever is a decision, right? And I haven't decided anything. I'm thirty-three. I have no house. No plan. I got nothing I was supposed to have by now, and instead I've got a patrol route and a girlfriend who memorized it, and that's..." She stopped. "That's not the thing I'm trying to say."

"Take your time."

"You always say that."

"Because it always works."

Dottie laughed, then stopped laughing. The record had moved on to something slow and stringy. Outside, Lot 7 sat dark and quiet, the fake saloon and the fake bank holding their shapes in the dark like they had for fifty years.

"The thing I'm trying to say is I want more," Dottie said. "Not from you. From me. I want to be somebody who decides things. And I keep not doing it because every time I get close I think, well, what if this is as good as it gets, and I don't want to poke at it. You don't poke at a good thing."

Nichole nodded slowly. "Okay. Can I say something?"

"You've been sitting on it for two years, I assume."

"Two years, actually." Nichole reached over and took the empty bottle out of her hand and set it down. "You talk about our routine like it's a trap you fell into. Dottie. I built that routine. On purpose. Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, that's not me going on autopilot, that's me building a life with you, on purpose, one week at a time, and you keep acting like it's something that happened to you."

"That's not fair."

"It's completely fair and it hurts a little, honestly."

Dottie looked at her. "Okay. That's fair. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry, just hear me. There is no version of my next year that doesn't have you in it. Every version. The house version, the ring version, whatever version. You're the fixed point. Everything else is negotiable." Nichole shrugged. "So when you say you're stalled out, I get a little confused, because from where I'm sitting, you're the only thing that's not stalled."

Dottie didn't say anything. Her eyes were doing the shiny thing again and she hated it.

"Also," Nichole said, "you stopped making lists at twenty-five, which was eight years ago, and in those eight years you moved in with me, got the job you're good at, learned to cook actual food, and got a girlfriend who drove to Fairfax on a Friday. That's a list. It just doesn't have a house on it yet."

"Yet," Dottie said.

"Yet," Nichole said. "I'm patient. I've been waiting on you for two years now, and I'd wait longer, but it's your birthday, and I figured tonight I'd stop being patient for one night and just tell you what I want."

"What do you want?"

"You. Come here."

"I'm right here."

"Closer. Come here."

Dottie went. She moved across the blanket on her knees and Nichole met her halfway and kissed her, slow, one hand on Dottie's jaw, thumb along her cheek. It was not a birthday peck. It was the kind of kiss Nichole did when