“Forty, help me out here.” I haven’t seen him this fucked up since Vegas and I forgot how annoying it is. And at the same time, I want to save him; Love rubs off on me.

“I mean, a job’s a job,” he says. “You spill, they wipe.”

I look at his swollen face. “You don’t hate me, do you?”

“Hate you?” he says. “How could I hate you? Dude, Amy Adams is gonna do The Mess.”

Will that name ever leave me? No. “Great,” I say. “Congrats.”

“It’s not for sure,” he backtracks. “But it looks good. Amy Fucking Adams. How could I hate you? I mean, you don’t even know the level of ass I am getting. Unpaid pussy, my friend. How could I hate you?”

I remember when I thought it would be a terrible thing to be a dog and now I fetch the chalupas and the hot sauce and the tacos and the gorditas. Woof!

Love wins another award for her charity work and I write a speech for her. On the way home, she says maybe we could have a winery. After the baby, of course. I can’t believe this is my life, where the possibility of periodically stomping on grapes and owning a vineyard is real.

I call Mr. Mooney on his birthday and tell him about Love, about meeting Jennifer Aniston and choosing books as Professor Joe. He asks if I’m getting my dick sucked then tells me he’s still in Florida. He has an orange tree and the oranges look nothing like the ones in New York. “They’re mottled,” he says. “Like the jelly beans with the flecks in them, never mind, I’m boring myself.” He sighs. The conversation dwindles and I go find Love. She’s outside, in her favorite float, the one with arm rests and drink holders and she’s wearing sunglasses. I jump into the pool and push the raft over. She screams again, and falls into the water. She comes up laughing, saltwater kisses. We float.

“Sam is at it again,” she says.

“Sam the work bitch?”

“Yeah,” she says. “We’re getting interns and she said we have to check to make sure they’re not on Pinterest because she says people on Pinterest are all stupid.”

“She’s stupid.”

“I know,” Love says.

“If you hate her so much why don’t you just fire her?”

Love rolls over onto her side and reaches out for me. “Because I don’t hate anyone,” she says. “I really don’t. It’s just not worth it.”

We hear her phone ringing, we hear my phone ringing.

Love runs to her phone and she answers. “Mom?” she says. And then seconds later, she drops her phone. I go to her.

She stares at me. She is different. She is frozen. My first concern is the baby but how could that be? It wasn’t the doctor on the phone.

“It’s Forty,” she says.

He went to the cops. That fucker. That louse. I’ll kill him. “What happened?” I ask.

And then she starts crying. It’s primal and terrifying and whatever that fucker did, he will pay for this. I grab the phone.

“Dottie?” I say, and I try to hug Love. And she’s shaking. Her whole body is convulsing and this cannot be good for our baby. “Dottie, are you there?”

“My boy,” she sobs. “My boy is dead.”

My body goes slack. “Forty is dead?”

When Love hears me say it, she lets out another scream and I tell Dottie I have to go and I don’t know if the baby will survive, but I know we will. I hug Love, I hold on to her. I wish I could make it better. But I can’t. Forty’s dead.

☺

53

FORTY didn’t overdose on Xanax or gorditas. He didn’t get cancer and he didn’t drown in the saltwater of the Pacific or the chlorinated water of the hotels he loved so much or the saltwater that his parents collected for him. A car hit Forty Quinn while he was crossing the street in Beverly Hills. The girl who hit him wasn’t drunk—God is not that trite—and she was driving a Honda Civic. She only just moved here. Her name is Julie Santos. The people in back of her were honking. Angelenos, particularly those on the Westside, don’t like to wait. Julie Santos says the guy in back of her had been riding her tail and honking. Her roommate told her that it’s basically legal to take a left-hand turn after the light turns red because otherwise, nobody would ever get anywhere.

Forty was sober; there were no drugs in his possession or inside him. He was going to Nate ’n Al’s alone to gorge on corned beef and French fries, according to the waiter who says Forty came in alone a lot over the years. We never knew that, any of us. Julie, who seems like a gentle, unsteady person, the kind who will never get over this accident, she wanted to see the Pretty Woman hotel and she knows it’s silly and it’s not even called the Reg Bev Wilsh anymore but . . . she cries. I resist the urge to make a joke about Forty and hookers, how even when he’s not blowing money on them, they’re in his domain, good old Julia Roberts.

A review of the security footage shows that Forty was jaywalking. Love’s teeth chatter. She tells me he got eight jaywalking tickets. Forty didn’t like to wait either; he wanted it now, his career, his Oscar, even the goddamn crosswalk. There will be charges filed against Julie Santos and she says she’s going to move back to Boston. She says she never wants to drive again and it feels like a bad thing, to move somewhere and kill someone immediately.

Nobody can believe it. I can’t believe it. I think about Julie Santos a lot. I find her on Facebook and Twitter and I could start a religion around her and God does have a sense of humor; her last name is saint. I did not pray for this but I am allowed to rejoice in this. Nobody will ever know about what happened between us in the desert. Nobody will ever know about our Taco Bell deals, his malfeasance. I am in Neiman Marcus and there are two tailors working on me at once because when you’re rich and someone you know dies, you go to Neiman’s and you get a new suit.

Love sits in a chair with her legs crossed. She isn’t crying anymore.

“Is it awful if I say you look hot?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “You say whatever you need to say.”

She nods. I ask the tailors to give us a moment and they oblige and I go to her and mirrors surround us and everywhere I look, I see us. Just us. The third twin is gone. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she says. “I promise I’m gonna come out of it.”

“Take your time.”

“It’s just weird.” She stares at her Kleenex. “I don’t know how to not worry about him.”

“I know.”

“It’s, like, my go-to place,” she says. “What do I do? I worry about Forty. I mean, it’s not even so much about drugs, even though it seems that way, it’s about being a twin.”

I tell her again to take all the time she needs and I promise to be here no matter what and she stops shredding her Kleenex and looks instead at me. “What would I do without you?”

“Irrelevant,” I tell her. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She hugs me and she cries again and one of the numerous pins in my suit pricks me and I bury the pain and I savor the pain. He’s dead. Julie Santos killed him. After all this time, I finally got a little fucking help from the man upstairs and I squeeze my girlfriend and I count my blessings. She pats my back. The tailors return and Love dries her eyes.

“You really do look hot,” she says.

The suit will be ready in time for the funeral. Milo is too sad to write a eulogy and Ray is in shock and I am the loyal boyfriend so I step up and I don’t just jot down some bullshit about his sense of humor and his big, fat heart. Fuck, no. I write the fuck out of this eulogy and it’s right up there with The Third Twin and my kidnapping script, the one I’ll volunteer to finish, now that he can’t because he’s dead.

Love and I emerge from the limousine and the carpet leading into the Beverly Hills Hotel is pink and green. Love says this was their favorite place when they were kids and they had their sweet sixteen party here and she is crying again and I hold her.