“But we are,” he says. “Joe, you ever hear of the Pantry?”

“Best grocery store ever,” I say. “There’s one right by my house.”

“In Brentwood?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

“Santa Monica?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

“Dude, you full time it in the ’Bu?” he asks.

“I live in Hollywood,” I say. “In an apartment building.”

Forty steps back and it’s like at school when they find out you get free breakfast and lunch. “Cool,” he says. “Holly would if she could, right, bro?”

“Our parents own the Pantry,” Love says, and my mind is blown and I don’t try to hide it. “Which does not make us famous.”

Everything is hazy as Love and Forty squabble over whether or not they’re famous. I can’t believe Love owns the Pantry, my special place, my haven. Ray and Dottie have been trying to send me their love since the day I got here.

“So, will you be joining us and the moms and the pops at the big C?” he asks.

I look at Love and she smiles at me. “We’re going to Chateau,” she says. “Will you come?”

“Sure,” I say, and it was on my list of places to go but I don’t want to act like a fucking tourist.

Forty strokes his chin and stares at me and Love asks what his problem is and he sighs. “I’m gonna guess that our new friend doesn’t have a jacket and I’m gonna suggest a pit stop along the way to amend this unbearable injustice. Yes?”

I look at Love. I say yes.

17

I’M at home in Love’s Tesla and I was born for this. We pull out of Soho House and I show her my Pantry playlists in my phone, my Shazam search history too. She wants to see my most played songs and she is perplexed. “This is a lot of stuff from Pitch Perfect,” she says. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I tell her she’s funny and I make up some shit about watching it on Netflix in the middle of the night and liking the swimming pool mash-up. Then I bring it back to us, to the Pantry playlists. “I just can’t get over it,” I say. “I love those playlists. I go in there just for the music.”

She gets all excited and her knees bump and she drums her elbows on the wheel. “You don’t understand how I am about to blow your mind,” she says. “I make those playlists.”

And she’s not kidding. My mind is blown. Love is the music designer and she is the person letting “Valerie” by the Zutons melt into Gregory Abbott.

“Nobody ever notices,” she says. “And I mean I think about this music, I obsess over this music. I think it’s because of my name, but I have like, ten thousand pictures of me posing in love songs, like ‘Stop! In the Name of Love,’ you know, me in front of a stop sign.”

I think it’s okay to touch her and I pat her knee. “Don’t worry. Your dorky little secret is safe with me and I’m not gonna jump out of the car.”

She has so many different smiles. This one is impish. “You can’t,” she says. “You’re locked in.”

“Good,” I say. She put me in a cage already. I tell her I love the funny names the Pantry has for each section.

“I named those when we rebranded,” she says. “I came up with Procrastination Nation when I was in college freaking out about my thesis.”

“I can’t believe this,” I say.

I ask if she studied drama in college and she tells me she’s not an actress. “I mean, I don’t think you grow up here without thinking about it, but I have a charity called Swim for Love, where we give lessons to at-risk kids. That’s my main focus. These movies Forty and I try to make never come together, which is fine. But I’d rather do that than audition. Wasn’t it so sad?”

I tell her my zombie-aspirations theory, that fame is the antidote, the issue of supply and demand. She says I sound like a writer and I say I’m a bookseller. But enough about me. “Tell me about the Pantry. Everything.”

She says her great-grandparents helped build California—one Pantry to start an empire—and now they own dozens of markets in California. They own acres of land and malls and holy shit, the girl is loaded.

“I’m not telling you to tell you,” she says. “I mean, I’m not bragging.”

“I know,” I say. “And I mean it when I say I would be excited if you only had the one store. I love it there.”

She laughs. “I’m starting to get the picture. And we have to thank your friend, the one who auditioned.” She taps my shoulder. “The reason we met.” Love is bold; Love is horny. “We should send her flowers. Or candy. What was her name again?”

“Nice try,” I say. “I’m not telling.”

She slaps the wheel. I laugh. “I still can’t believe the way your parents have been telling me about you and I had no idea.”

“Well, that send our love thing, that was my dad’s idea,” she says. “My parents, they’re kind of grossly in love. And after I was born—after we were born—my dad was like, ‘Let’s spread the love. Let’s make that a part of our every day.’”

“I think it’s sweet. My parents hated each other and our grocery store had fucking rats.”

She has a loose high laugh. She says that Ray and Dottie are middle school sweethearts. Dottie’s father was a butcher. Ray’s father owned the Pantry. They fell in love as children, stayed in love as teenagers, and they’re still nauseatingly in love now. I laugh. Love says that I won’t be laughing in an hour when we’re all at Chateau together. “It’s just not normal,” she says. “It’s like they never got over each other. They act like they’re in high school.”

“That’s unusual.”

Love says it kind of sucks and sighs and says she believes in laying it all out there. She blames her parents’ happiness and her given name on her proclivity for relationships. She’s been married twice.

“Twice?” I ask. I hold my phone up to the window; my service is bad and I want to Google her.

“Use my iPad,” she says. “The password is Love.”

The password is Love and I pick up her iPad and she tells me about her husbands. She met Michael Michael Motorcycle in Vegas—total asshole—and she was young and stupid and resentful and on blow. They lasted eleven months.

“Eleven months?” I say. “That’s impressive.”

“You gotta try,” she says and sometimes I can’t tell if she’s being earnest. She married her second husband, a black doctor named Dr. Trey Hanes, eight years ago. “He was my heart.”

I go into Safari and look at her search history: boots puppies boots snow boots puppies Labs chocolate labs black dog booties over the knee boots yellow labs.

I don’t see how this can be it. Maybe it’s some rich person privacy setting where no matter what you look up, it just says boots puppies, because the girl searching for boots and puppies can’t be the insightful woman here in the Tesla, the one telling me about her marriage to Trey. “We were both twenty-seven,” she says. “We were crazy in love.”

Boots and puppies. “Uh huh.”

“But then he got sick. Cancer,” she says. “People always talk about the fight but Trey didn’t get to fight. We didn’t get to, you know, I didn’t have the chance to clean him up after chemo or shave my head to go along with his.”

“He died that fast,” I say. And maybe boots and puppies are a defense mechanism. “That’s horrible.”

“It wasn’t cancer. He drowned when we went surfing, right after he got diagnosed.” She grips the steering wheel more tightly. “My mom would kill me if she could see me right now. She says I talk about this stuff way too early. But you know how your brain has sort of a baseline resting thought, a thing you talk about with yourself?”

MugofUrineCandaceBenjiPeachBeckHendersonMugofUrine. “Yeah.”

“Well, mine is always about Trey,” she says. “I think he killed himself. I think he felt so bad about me having to watch him die that he killed himself. And not in a coroner poison kind of way. I mean, did you ever read Flesh and Blood?”