Chapter 1 Do What You Gotta Do #2
“No,” the blonde says. “You’ll be fast, I’m sure. You go.”
And though all Frankie intends to do is tell the woman thank you, instead she hugs her.
A full hug, with her arms wrapped around the woman’s shoulders.
The embrace catches even Frankie off guard, and she feels the woman stiffen and then relax.
At last, she whispers into Frankie’s ear, “You just need a good brilliantine. And a brush.”
Before the protests get too loud, Frankie follows the manager to a corner, where he takes a seat. When he flips over her application, she quickly starts to explain. “The charges were—”
“You got an arrest on your record?”
“You see, my mother—”
“That lady was right, this is gonna be fast.” He turns in his seat, yelling to a man near the kitchen, “I thought you got the bad ones out!”
Frankie stays seated. “You want someone like me to work for you. Someone not afraid to get their hands dirty. Someone who will do what it takes to get the job done.”
There’s a second when he pauses, when she knows he’s actually considering her words. But then there’s a smirk. “The job’s waiting tables. I’d prefer hands that are clean.”
“I know how to cook every Italian dish. Ribollita, puttanesca, crostata, I can make a Bolognese that will make your heart sing—”
“Don’t need it, don’t need it, don’t need it. And what makes my heart sing is someone without a record. Please. Do what you gotta do in life, but you can’t do it here.”
Tall buildings hunker over the street, casting shadows.
Frankie stands in a wedge of cold outside the restaurant, watching three feathers flutter slowly to the ground, before she looks up, tracing the fire escape all the way to the top, where a group of kids hang their arms over the railing, watching the plumage drift.
She closes her eyes. Just barely, existing somewhere behind the noise of everything, she thinks she hears a chicken scream. Then silence.
She’s tired. Though a wood partition separates her from the family who shares her small apartment, in one spot they ran out of wood, and so the wall is improvised with a hanging sheet.
Late at night, when the man’s wife and child are sleeping, he cries.
And though he retreats to the corner farthest from them, he forgets, or doesn’t have the luxury to care, that Frankie’s right there, just beyond the tattered cotton, sleepless and living both his sorrow and her own.
If she traded sides with them, she could tuck herself into an alcove and spare herself some sound, but many of her best memories with her mother took place at the window on her side.
It was there they carved hearts in the wood, there her mother taught her a wordless code for I love you—three taps in the center of her palm, a silent promise in the night—and there her mother strung up a plastic morning glory vine, the purple petals now dusty but beautiful if Frankie squints.
“Never lead with the word honestly,” someone says. “It’s like a megaphone announcing you’re about to lie.”
The man in the pinstripe suit. Italian, forties.
Pants with the perfect pleat. A side part and slicked-back hair.
He has the appearance of something polished to a dangerous shine, and yet the laugh lines at his eyes and the set of his mouth convey a sense of humor, a slight undoing to his composure.
“But you got one thing right: Pay someone a compliment, and you win ’em over. That was fun.”
“Was it, now?” she asks, peering back up at a sky that’s mended. Seam of light sewn shut, the colors gone.
“More fun for me than you. I get that. But listen, I didn’t come out here to proposition you.
Or maybe I did.” Now she looks at him sharply, and he laughs, a laugh that seems to gather momentum.
“Here’s what I’m saying. I could use someone like you.
For work. Someone who thinks on their feet.
” He smiles. “Someone not afraid to get their hands dirty.”
She stands straight. Can almost feel the ruler along her spine, the sisters’ way of making sure she didn’t slouch. “Done. I’m your girl. When do I start?”
Again, a laugh that gets bigger as if he’s retelling a joke in his mind. “You probably shouldn’t ask when but where.”
She stays silent, waiting.
“Fine. The answer’s five days and two trains away from here. But you get yourself there, show me you want it, and the job’s yours.”
In a little over two years, on a mockingly clear and beautiful March afternoon, she will think of this day while attending a funeral at Hollywood Memorial Park.
As knives of sunlight glint on the pond near the mausoleum and fans push against barricades, ripples of grief overtaking them now and then, Frankie will hide in the corner, guilt tugging at her heart as her mind traces the breadcrumbs of events back to this day in New York, this afternoon when the sky broke open.
What would’ve happened if she never looked up?
Or if that boy didn’t decide to sell newspapers on that specific corner, that corner where her heart started beating and her mind went loud and the world stopped, just for a bit, to peer at a crack in the sky?
If that moment didn’t occur, would the gun have gone off, years later?
The link in the chain. The breath before the sentence. That’s how she will think of this moment, right here, when the man hands her his business card.
Nico Marconi. Head of Publicity. RCO Studios. Hollywood, California.