The Throwback List

by Lily Anderson

  Once the jalapeños had been arranged and Jo had a fresh green bottle in hand, she took her time shooting the tray, pausing at intervals to adjust the angle of the tots.

  The inside of her tote glowed blue as her phone blinked a notification. Jo set her camera down and cracked her knuckles. She ate one more tot from the back of the Sheet Load as she plugged her passcode in.

  “You have one unheard message—” said the voicemail robot. There was a short inhale and then a soothing NPR announcer voice saying, “Hello, Johanna, this is Trish Zavaglia from the Seattle City Orchestra. We would like to interview you for the social media strategist position you applied for on our website. If you could give me a call back at your earliest convenience…”

  Jo choked on her Perrier.

  Job applications had started to feel like a shitty hobby she had—a daily surrendering of her career history to every spam folder on the West Coast. She still hadn’t heard back on jobs she’d applied to while living in her own apartment. Seattle City Orchestra was actually within driving distance. It was actually in a real city.

  It was actually possible.

  Reeling, Jo went out to the parking lot before she returned the call. For some reason, talking toward the ocean made her feel more calm. Maybe it was just being away from the smell of nacho cheese.

  She came back to the totchos with a scheduled job interview. Friday morning, she wouldn’t take pictures of the burger menu as planned. She was going to drive to Seattle. For a job interview. For a real job that could go on her real résumé. It was even her old title: social media strategist. She could live without influencer relations manager tacked on at the end. Or she could add it back on for a pay bump.

  “Do you know much about orchestra music?” Alfie Jay asked her as he brought out a Cobb salad for Jo to have for lunch. He seemed to enjoy finding the non-seafood menu items for her to eat. Probably because it was expensive to waste shrimp on someone who gagged at the smell.

  “Not a thing,” Jo said. She barely even remembered applying to the job. Wren had convinced her on their nondate to expand her search to include lower Washington. “But I have two days and a four-hour drive to Seattle to figure it out.”

  The orchestra could hand her back the key to her adulthood. She could get on track with her old game plan again. She could still ascend to director of digital strategy in the next four years.

  Her parents booked her a hotel room—which was low-key humiliating to accept, and even more so when it came with a warning not to overspend on room service. “We’re already buying you food to eat at home,” Phil said with his not-joking laugh. “Maybe bring a sandwich for the road.”

  Jo drove up to Washington the day before the interview, listening to playlists of classical-music podcasts, hoping to absorb the jargon, and Megan Thee Stallion, hoping to absorb the bad-bitch vibe.

  She walked through Seattle trying to look at it through the rose-tinted glasses of a blind date. Could she fall in love with that coffee shop? This neighborhood? That mural? Could these be the sidewalks she rushed down looking for lunch? The receptionist she flirted with, the elevator she rode, the echoing hallways she worked like a runway?

  The interview ran long—she managed to keep the panel talking and they asked about the Throwback List, that must be a good sign, right?—but then she was being thanked for her time and offered a round of inscrutable handshakes. She was ushered back into the lobby, where the cute receptionist asked how it went.

  “Great!” Jo said, with a confidence she didn’t actually feel. Admittedly her last job interview had mostly been a formality with Devo Quandt when she’d been promoted from the standing desk to a paid position. He hadn’t even asked her about her job history, just told her that it might take a while for the office to stop calling her Intern Jo. Maybe it was a good sign that the orchestra panel had called her Ms. Freeman and assured her that she’d hear back from them soon.

  Replaying her answers in her head on her walk back to the parking garage, she couldn’t see any immediate reason for them not to hire her. They’d laughed at her joke about their competitors at the philharmonic only posting pictures in black and white. She had successfully named their last two concerts without referring to her notes. Now all she could do was wait for their call.

  Buckled into her Mini, she jumped when she saw the clock. She was two hours behind the schedule she’d written in her bullet journal last night. Suddenly she was staring down the barrel of a six-person dinner party from the wrong side of the state line.

  She didn’t even have time to rinse the smell of hotel room bar soap from her skin. She drove directly from the orchestra to the boardwalk, arriving back in Sandy Point at eighty miles an hour. Ninety minutes until her guests were promised dinner.

  The sand-dusted planks of the boardwalk crunched underfoot as Jo jogged from the parking lot. The salt air in her tight lungs made her feel sixteen years old and late for a shift at the art gallery. Teen!Jo was docked a dollar for being tardy—and she was often tardy, sitting at the other end of the boardwalk with Wren’s Rapunzel hair wrapped around both of them.

  She was so lost in the memory that she almost ran too far, expecting to see the kinetic pirate-ship sculpture that had tricked many a tourist into coming into Freeman Fine Arts. Instead, she found herself outside of the Surf & Saucer, where the window display was a surfboard covered in a massive lace doily. She took a deep breath before she stuck her key in the lock.

  If a lace doily could hump a surfboard into submission, the end result would surely be her parents’ odd hybrid tea-parlor surf-shop. Jo hoped she hadn’t made a mistake trying to stage a photo shoot here.

  One-Eighty Boardwalk Avenue, the building that Phil and Deb Freeman had spent their 401(k)s on, was a crowded, wood-paneled box that faced the ocean. The rough plank walls had once been rich brown, two shades darker than the back of Jo’s hand. Now, thanks to a former HGTV host also named Jo, the walls were white shiplap.

  Jo had a lot of snarky remarks about her parents whitewashing their business, but she was keeping them as a list in her bullet journal instead of saying them aloud. Having floated one by Eden on the way home from pranking Wren, she knew the reception would not be friendly. Mom just likes easy-to-clean walls, okay?!

  Jo made multiple trips back to the parking lot to retrieve the boxes and bags of Kelly house treasures. Thanks to her interview, the week had slipped out of her fingers like sand in a windstorm. Now she had a whole dinner to cook and shoot, and she was sweating just from bringing in the dishware. She didn’t know how the hell she was going to also socialize at the party.

  Moving aside starfish-and-sand-dollar-pasted cake stands by the handful and worried that she’d already missed her window for calling the whole thing off, she found her phone and texted Autumn in a mild panic.

  JO: I just got back to town from my interview! Any chance you could help set up for tonight? My family is at the movies in Tillamook.

  AUTUMN: Sorry! Wren and I are at a PTA event for another hour.

  (Can you even picture me and baby Wren hanging with the wine moms??)

  If you need-need help, I can totally send you Flo! He’s already home from work.

  Jo blew out a breath before she responded. She didn’t like needing anything. But imagining Wren and Bianca Boria showing up to a dinner party with no dinner felt like handcrafting a nightmare straight out of her Honor Society days.

  JO: Yeah, I need-need.

  AUTUMN: You got it!!

  Not long after, Flo appeared in the closed dining room with wet hair and a metal coffee thermos. He immediately jumped in to help Jo move a table.

  “Coach! You’re a hero and a half,” Jo said.

  “Happy to help,” Flo said, showing no visible strain as they dropped the table into place. He craned his head to look around. “And it looks like most of the helping is—”

  “Hiding the ugly shit, yes,” Jo said. “But first, food prep.”

  She led him into the prep kitchen.
The dishwasher pumped out boiling steam as it sanitized plates from the lunch rush. “We don’t have clean dishes yet, but I do have—”

  “A list?” Flo guessed into the rim of his thermos. He took a long, pointed sip.

  “You don’t get any points for knowing the one thing about me that even strangers know.” Jo pulled out the pad of Post-its she’d prefilled with recipes and reminders. She stuck them on the fridge in order, overlapping them like pastel petals. “We’re already behind, so I need everything done from T-minus-three-hours to present. This job interview totally fucked my schedule.”

  1. REST CHEESES

  She pulled open the fridge and piled precut fruit and fancy cheeses on the butcher-block counter.

  “Your social media is falling behind because you might get a job?” Florencio asked in falsetto singsong. “Oh no.”

  “It’s a social media job, Florencio,” Jo said, thrusting a wedge of Brie into his hand. “If I can’t keep up with my own brand, how am I gonna create one for the orchestra?”

  He laughed, tossing the Brie into the cheese pile. “If you give the orchestra marketing momentum, you’ll be burned as a witch.” He scooched in close, the tattoos on his right arm brushing against Jo’s sleeve as he reached into the fridge to help. She noticed that he often kept his right sleeve pushed up so the word nature was visible, printed down the length of his forearm. Above it, she recognized the flag of the Philippines from its eight-pointed star. Before it decorated his arm, the tricolor flag had been hung in Flo’s bedroom on Main Street beneath his trophy collection.

  2. DECANT WINES

  Florencio popped the cork out of Jo’s old friend Fred Meyer Malbec. “Vos is coming, huh? Autumn said that they were riding over together after Boosters Bingo.”

  “A group hang seemed like the lowest-pressure way to see her again,” Jo admitted. She dragged her eyes away from Flo’s biceps and back to his face. “We’ve only hung out once since I’ve been back. After Frosty’s, everyone was so sure that I was feeling her, but I need more eyes to tell me where she’s at.”

  “I’ll be happy to give you an unbiased report,” Florencio said. He had the same high-eyebrow active-listening face as Autumn. “I was already graduated when you guys dated the first time. To me, she’s just Thatcher Vos’s little sister.”

  “And your boss?”

  “My administrator,” Flo corrected. “My supervisor’s supervisor, at best.”

  3. PRESSURE-COOK MEATBALLS

  Following her mother’s instructions to check behind the rice cooker, air fryer, and food processor, Jo found the pressure cooker. She set it down as soon as she picked it up, alarmed by the number of buttons staring back at her.

  “How do I set this so that it doesn’t explode?” she asked aloud, checking inside for a user’s manual. There wasn’t one. “Pressure cookers always explode on Food Network.”

  “You’re scared of a slightly souped-up Crock-Pot? Move, Freeman.” Flo slid in front of her, expertly pressing a series of buttons. The pot sounded like a furious digital cricket. “Can I get a recipe, or am I winging this?”

  Jo pulled the recipe sticky note off the fridge mural. She stuck it on the wall at Florencio’s eye level and got to work pulling ingredients out of the fridge. She lined up jars in front of him.

  “You and Vos rekindling could be cute,” Flo said. “Did you know my parents were high school sweethearts?”

  Jo knew that he was referring to the Kellys. She didn’t know anything about his birth parents except for what was represented on his left arm. The Filipino flag. Jasmine flowers. Words in Tagalog between lines and lines of black triangles.

  “Your parents are the inspiration for this list item,” she admitted, rummaging around in the fridge for a missing basket of blackberries her father had sworn would be waiting for them. “They were the only people I knew who had real dinner parties. They must have had everyone in town over to eat at least once.”

  Reading the Post-it, Flo rearranged the ingredients into working order. “Mom liked having an open door.”

  “I was always so happy crowded into the dining room, pulling in chairs from all the other rooms so we could all eat together,” Jo said, picturing the house in its heyday, not as the cold gray storage container she had seen last weekend. She threw a bag of herbs onto the butcher block in case they were helpful. “Do you remember playing rock, paper, scissors to see who could eat alone in the beanbags?”

  “Remember?” Flo chuckled. He popped the top off a jelly jar. “I was reigning champ. Undefeated.”

  “Other parents would have said that their kids could use the special chairs. Especially since we all wanted them. But yours made sure to keep it fair.” She found the blackberries behind a stack of many kinds of cream cheese. She took them over to the sink, shaking the basket under the faucet, rinsing and checking for mold spots with each bounce. “We would get so hyped hearing the front door slam shut. The more times it closed, the crazier things were gonna be.”

  “Because if there were over ten people,” he said, playing along, while into the pot, he threw jalapeños, jelly, and frozen meatballs with the same offhand competence that he had making drinks at Days, “the Chief went into the deep freezer for ice cream to get rid of everyone. ‘Take your Fudgsicles and go home!’”

  Jo had always been allowed to stay, even when everyone else got kicked out. Best-friend privileges. She held the damp basket of berries out to Flo. “It was like any day at your house could turn into Thanksgiving. Non-genocide-related Thanksgiving.”

  He cocked an eyebrow and dumped the berries into the pressure cooker. “Can you separate Thanksgiving from the genocide?”

  “I wonder that every November. It really needs rebranding. Otherwise we’re all guilty of perpetuating the myth of the friendly colonizer.”

  Flo slammed the lid shut with a scoff. “No joke is safe around you, Freeman.”

  4. REARRANGE TABLES

  In the dining area that had once been the local-pottery section of Freeman Fine Arts, Jo shoved aside all but one of the irritatingly round tables.

  “It was a bummer to see the house on Main Street abandoned,” she said. She set a cardboard box of wineglasses on the table and looked over her shoulder at Flo.

  His eyes caught hers, unfooled. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Are you never going back? You’re going to avoid it forever?”

  “This from the girl who avoided her home state for—what was it? Five years? Isn’t this the first time you’ve ever seen the new shop?” he asked, gesturing around at the room.

  Jo held up her hands. “Hey, I’m not saying you can’t avoid your parents. I’m just curious about why that means they have to hold on to your letterman jacket.”

  “You snooped through my room?” His face twisted in familiar annoyance. It made him look like the squawky kid she and Autumn used to spend the summer having water-balloon wars against, back when they were young enough to wrassle.

  “If you don’t want people to wander into your Rihanna jack shack, then don’t abandon it!”

  He rolled his eyes. “Now you just sound like Autumn.”

  “Hardly,” Jo said. “Autumn would never say jack shack. Your mother would sense it and immediately collapse.”

  5. SET UP LIGHTING TREES

  She spun in a circle, searching the netting-draped tables for her lighting equipment. “Do you see a gray tote full of umbrellas?”

  Flo found the bag under a fallen surf doily. He helped Jo set up the lighting trees around the room.

  “I’m not mad that Mommy and Daddy don’t love each other anymore, you know,” he grunted, unscrewing the lock on a tripod.

  “So, you aren’t avoiding the house because it represents all of your broken dreams?” Jo asked with a cheeky wince. “Because the optics—”

  “Have you ever been cheated on?” he interrupted.

  Jo tucked her chin back. “Um. No? Not to my knowledge.”

  “It sucks,” Flo said. “I
t’s basically the worst thing you could do to someone who loves you. And my dad, Chief Chuck Kelly—the fireman who can go out and chase down wildfires and run into burning buildings and never get sick when he sees blood—that guy? He’s actually a fucking coward. I spent my whole life thinking he was some big hero, but when he wanted out of his relationship, he had to sneak around to do it. He couldn’t be uncomfortable long enough to have an up-front conversation with my mom. And that hurt all of us. Broke our family up. I have to look out for my own feelings, Autumn’s, Mom’s. Why should Dad get my time, too? When your house is on fire, you don’t save the arsonist.”

  Jo blinked at him. “That’s actually kind of noble of you, Coach.”

  “Maybe I’m kind of noble. I’ve got a heart, you know. A big one.”

  Jo giggled. ““It doesn’t matter which organ you brag about. It’s just gonna sound like a dick euphemism.” She deepened her voice and bowed her legs. “My massive brain. My huge, rock-hard liver.”

  “Is that what you think I sound like? Keanu Reeves?”

  “My enlarged gallbladder knows kung fu,” said Jo–as–Keanu Reeves.

  6. HIDE BEACHY SHIT

  “The list says beachy,” Jo clarified. “But it means offensively ugly. I have to take pictures of this room. No fake Hummel figurines. No dried coral. Nothing branded Sex Wax.”

  “It’s for foot traction,” Flo said, idly knocking on a can of Sex Wax. He looked over his shoulder at Jo’s silence. “On surfboards. Not beds.”

  “And I am not going to deal with a hundred comments of people needing that particular explanation. Put one of those towel ponchos on top of them.”

  He picked up one of the purple tie-dyed towels. “I thought you said nothing offensively ugly?”

  She laughed, artfully stacking leftover teacups on the tables around the wide party table. “Thanks for your help tonight. I hope I’m not ruining your weekend.”