Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Amy Gentry

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gentry, Amy, author.

  Title: Last woman standing / Amy Gentry.

  Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2019] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018017517 (print) | LCCN 2018021380 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780544963870 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544962538 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION

  / Thrillers. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS 3607. E 567 (ebook) | LCC PS3607.E567L37 2019 (print) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017517

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Author photograph © Matt Valentine

  v1.1218

  For AJZ, a very wise woman

  NANCY: I oughta go to you for plots.

  SYLVIA: You oughta go to someone.

  —The Women, 1939

  1

  “Next up, Daaaaana Diaz!”

  A few hands clapped as I stepped up onto the wooden platform stage, picking my way around the PA system. Under the lights, I tugged my shirt hem away from the waistband of my jeans one last time, cleared a strand of dark brown hair from my lip-glossed smile, and palmed the mic, carefully unwrapping the cord from the stand. No point in losing two minutes wrestling it down to my level—five foot four in the four-inch heels I am rarely without onstage.

  “Hello, everyone,” I said. “I’m Dana, and I will be your brown person for the evening.”

  I waited for the uncomfortable snicker, but there was only the dim, offended pause of a bar in which the music had been turned off, followed by a hacking cough. I forged ahead.

  “And don’t tell me to go back where I came from. Amarillo is the pits.” Silence again. I toyed with the mic stand. “Have we got anyone here from Amarillo tonight? No one?” There was no hoot. “It’s okay, I wouldn’t cop to it either if it wasn’t my job. Well, hobby.”

  I’d been back in Austin a little over a year, performing as many open-mics and guest spots and showcases as I could force myself to show up for, and I’d earned my slot in the Nomad Third Thursday lineup fair and square. But nothing was landing lately, and I wasn’t sure why.

  I pressed on. “There’s not a lot to do in Amarillo. I mean, the second-largest employer in town is a helium plant. When I was in high school, we used to hang out behind the Seven-Eleven and—” I mimed sucking on a Mylar balloon, then made my voice high and squeaky: “Hey, dude, stop bogarting the Happy Birthday from SpongeBob and Friends.”

  Blank stares. If my pothead voice has never been too convincing, it’s because my weekends in high school were actually pretty clean. Jason and I saw what drugs did to his big brother and wanted nothing to do with them. I made a mental note to work on my funny voice and kept plowing through the set. “My mom worked at the helium plant when I was a kid. For the longest time I thought she was a birthday clown.” Beat. “Take Your Daughter to Work Day was a real disappointment.”

  Scanning the seats closest to the stage for a friendly face, I saw only dull-eyed drunks and bad Tinder dates. I let my mind drift into the depthless glare of the lights. It was Jason, my writing partner and best friend since we were fourteen, who’d told me long ago to find the friendliest face in the crowd when I was bombing and focus on telling all my jokes to that person alone. Jason’s trick rarely won the audience back, but I’d bombed enough by now to know that didn’t matter as much as showing the audience you were doing just fine up there, thank you. Nothing is more cringe-inducing than watching someone flail onstage. Privately, I had a name for this rule: No blood in the water.

  I could feel myself fidgeting to the right and left, straining my voice to sound bigger. After four years in Los Angeles, it was a struggle to relax in this too-easy town. I missed the grind. The crowds in L.A. had been tough, but they’d made me tougher too; here in Austin, indifference was the killer. By the time I left L.A., Jason was barely talking to me, so I didn’t bother telling him what I told everybody else: I needed a break, just a short one, and then I’d return. But it was harder than it sounded. Last time I’d made the move, I was five years younger, and I wasn’t alone. Everything had been easier with Jason, who knew where we’d come from and how important it was to keep moving forward so we’d never slide back.

  So much for that. After four years away, it felt like I was just starting out in Austin all over again, except the comedy scene was more crowded and the beer more expensive. The rent on my crummy apartment was going to skyrocket when the lease came up in a few months, my take from the tip jar barely covered a pint after the set, and I was still paying dues in flop sweat at dive bars and coffee shops. Twenty-eight might not be old, but it was too old for this.

  “I’d like to thank my mom for giving me the initials double D.” I stared pointedly down at my chest and was rewarded with a handful of snickers. Ah, boob jokes. Comedy gold. “That made junior high a real blast.”

  “Nice tits!” someone called from the back of the club.

  “Bobby Mickelthwaite, is that you?” Without missing a beat, I shaded my eyes with my hand as if trying to see past the spotlights. “You haven’t changed a bit since seventh grade.” I squinted. “Except—what is it? Oh yeah, you’re a lot uglier.”

  Undaunted, the voice shouted, “Take off your top!”

  “Same razor-sharp wordplay, though,” I muttered and made to move on.

  “Show us your tits!”

  A few people booed. One yelled, “Shut up!” I felt the thrilling tang of the audience’s anger but knew that if it got out of control, the heckler would succeed in wresting their attention away from the stage permanently. I suppressed a tickle of panic. No blood in the water, I thought. Show them you can take care of yourself.

  I sweetened up my voice until it dripped saccharine and said, “Who hurt you?” Then, in my normal voice: “First and last name, please. I want to know who to PayPal to make it happen again.” The audience laughed uncertainly at the suggestion of violence. “And again. And again.”

  The heckler subsided into drunken mumbles, but only a few people laughed. “I’m just kidding, guys!” I said, spreading my arms wide. “I don’t make that kind of money. Maybe we can set up a GoFundMe?”

  Mixed laughter and boos, though I couldn’t tell whether the boos were meant for me or the heckler. The bouncer was finally making his way over to the guy, so I picked the set back up where I’d left off, transitioning into a bit about my day job. My adrenaline was up and so was the crowd’s, but it wasn’t a good feeling. Since they hadn’t be
en with me before, the heckler had only condensed the toxic energy in the room into something tangible. Don’t close your eyes, I told myself, Don’t blink until you’ve got them back. But black dots began to multiply in my peripheral vision.

  I heard her savage bark of laughter first, and then I spotted her: the friendly face. The woman sat at a table near the wall, a green neon beer sign lighting up her shaggy blond hair. I caught a glimpse of large eyes set far apart in deep-shadowed sockets, sharp cheekbones, white teeth clenched in a grin. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed her earlier—either she hadn’t been under the light before or she hadn’t been laughing. Now she was nodding like a dandelion in the breeze, an oasis of rapt approval, and I felt myself relaxing. I memorized her face and for the rest of my set, I looked at the crowd as usual but told my jokes solely to the dandelion woman, who intermittently let out a guffaw. The ten minutes went by mercifully fast, and then I stepped off the carpet-covered dais, out of the lights, and back into the ordinary darkness of a grimy bar.

  “Give it up one more time for Dana Diaz!” Fash, the emcee, shouted to limp applause as I stepped over the amplifier cords and skirted the edge of the room heading toward the bar. “Up next . . .”

  Up next was Toby, a hipster from Minneapolis who was about to move to L.A.—“So let’s give him a warm sendoff!” (Scattered applause.) After him would come Kim, aka the Other Girl, with her heavy blond bangs and Courtney Love slipdress, then James, who wore suspenders and played a ukulele. Last of all, Fash Banner, the emcee and organizer, who’d placed third last year in the annual Funniest Person in Austin contest. I didn’t have the heart to watch them all succeed or fail, one after the other. I wanted my drink in the other room, and tonight it needed to be on the strong side. “Whiskey soda,” I said to Nick, the Thursday bartender, over the sound of Toby launching into his set.

  “Let me get that for you,” a voice said at my elbow, and someone slapped a credit card down and pushed it across the bar. I turned and saw the woman with the friendly face.

  “Thanks,” I said. I was in no position to turn down a free drink, and I felt a lingering warmth toward the stranger for helping me get through a bad set. I surveyed the blond woman standing next to me, or rather towering over me—though it doesn’t take much to do that—and could see, close-up, that her mess of wavy hair was bleached in big chunks that had grown out around dark blond roots. The mandarin collar of her beat-up biker jacket gave her a faintly priest-like look.

  “One for me too,” she added in Nicky’s direction, and I realized she meant to sit down and have a drink with me. It was too late to stop it now, so I picked up my whiskey soda on its damp cardboard coaster, gestured toward Toby on the stage to indicate we should quit talking, and started walking to the other room to see if she’d follow. In less than a minute, she appeared in the doorway of the side room with her drink and glided toward my table. The PA system was quieter here, the hum of drinkers more subdued.

  “I’m Amanda,” she said, sticking her hand out. “I thought you were amazing dealing with that drunk guy, and I wanted to buy you a drink.”

  It was as I had suspected; she had watched the whole set but started caring only during the heckling incident. It cast a bit of a pall on the free drink.

  “Dana,” I said, shaking her hand. “And thanks. It didn’t win me any Brownie points with the crowd, though.”

  “People don’t always like hearing the truth,” she said. “But guys like that need to be taken out.”

  Guys like that. It was almost sweet. “You don’t see a lot of comedy, do you?”

  Amanda smiled. “No,” she admitted. “I just moved here a few weeks ago.” Whether she meant it as a justification of why she hadn’t seen much comedy or as an explanation of why she’d decided to come tonight, I couldn’t tell.

  “Well, Amanda,” I said, “‘Show me your tits’ is like heckler preschool for a female standup. If you can’t deal with that . . .” I shrugged.

  “So you get harassed like that all the time?” Her eyes were wide and unbelieving. “And you just have to take it?”

  “Hecklers go after everyone,” I said uncomfortably. “It comes with the territory. It’s not really that bad, though. Honestly—” I laughed. “I mean, better a heckler than a creepy comment from the emcee.”

  “That happens?”

  “Or a bunch of rape jokes in the set before mine. Or, my favorite, when an audience member comes up to you afterward and says, ‘You’re funny—for a girl.’” I’d long since tired of these old “women in comedy” chestnuts and tuned it out when I heard other female comics griping. It wasn’t that they weren’t true, it was just that there was no point in focusing on them. But now, perversely amused by Amanda’s shocked expression, I found myself relishing them.

  “You must develop a thick skin,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Sure. I used to be a size two,” I cracked. The joke flew past her, which I found oddly endearing. My mother didn’t get my jokes either, but I could never be sure how much of that was the language barrier and how much was a defense against being reminded of my wisecracking dad, who was long gone. Sometimes she chose what she did and didn’t understand.

  Amanda was looking at me expectantly, waiting to hear the rest of the story, and with a large sip of my whiskey soda, I resigned myself to explaining further. “All I mean is, you get a knack for dealing with hecklers pretty early on. Otherwise you get derailed.”

  “I can’t imagine thinking up an insult that fast.”

  “It’s not really about the zinger. It’s about getting through the moment so you can move on with your set. Showing him”—I corrected myself—“no, showing the audience that he’s not getting to you.”

  “Really? You didn’t enjoy it even a little? Smacking that guy around just now, making him feel small?” Her eyes narrowed and she smiled conspiratorially. “Come on.”

  The whiskey warm in my stomach, I laughed. “Maybe a little,” I admitted. In the moment of zinging the nice-tits guy, there had been a tiny spark of pleasure in imagining him getting hurt. The thought made me uncomfortable. There was something indecent about it, though a lot of comics indulged the impulse. It was time for a change of subject. “You said you just moved here? Where from?”

  “Los Angeles,” she said. “I was trying to be an actor.”

  Rather than surprise, I felt a wave of recognition. Her combination of naiveté and poise reminded me of certain women I’d met in acting classes, frail women with striking features who’d been spotted in laundromats or plucked out of drugstore lines in their hometowns while waiting to buy cigarettes. Groomed for girl groups and minor roles on soap operas, they seldom made the cut. They had too little imagination and too much reality for acting, and they eventually slipped back into the beautiful scenery of L.A. or moved on.

  “I lived out there for a while too,” I said. “Maybe we have mutual friends.”

  “I was only there a year,” she said, swizzling her drink. “I hated it there.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I lied, suddenly thinking of a pilot idea: Failed actress opens community theater in her hometown. Waiting for Guffman meets Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I fiddled with my napkin, wishing I’d brought my pen. “You probably got there right before I left. Let’s see . . .” I began running through an inventory of places we might have bumped into each other, listing improv theaters, acting workshops, networking events, even the Culver City diner where I’d waited tables. At every name, she shook her head. We’d just missed each other, although as I listed potential sources of connection, the familiar feeling strengthened rather than weakened. “Who did you hang out with there?” I asked.

  “No one, really. I lost all my friends when I lost my job in tech.” She saw my questioning look and elaborated. “I was a programmer for Runnr.”

  Even I, a borderline technophobe, had heard of the errand-running app that had pushed all the others out of business, though in this gig economy, more of my friends had worked as runners th
an used the service. My face must have betrayed some of the surprise I was feeling, tinged with shame over my assumptions—girl groups and soap operas!—because she gave me a wry grin. “Yeah, I know. I don’t look like a software engineer. Any more than you look like a standup.”

  I flushed. It was true that my appearance—short and brown-skinned and shaped like my mother minus the control-top pantyhose—did not prepare most people for my extracurricular activities. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s just say none of the guys I worked with thought I looked like a programmer either. They made that abundantly clear.” She took another sip. “And that was before my supervisor started sending me dick pics.”

  “Gross,” I said. Guys like that. “Is that how you lost your job?”

  “Yeah.” She finished her drink, holding the straw to one side and draining it. “Like an idiot, I actually went to HR with it. Two years in the trenches of a sexual-harassment suit got me a little pile of settlement money, sure. But it also got me the cold shoulder from every startup in Silicon Valley. And then there were the trolls—someone on Reddit guessed my name from a news spot. It couldn’t have been hard to figure out. There weren’t tons of female programmers at Runnr.”

  “So how’d you end up in L.A.?”

  “It seemed like the best place to disappear.” She looked down into her empty drink. “One of them swatted me—you know what that means, right? They sent a SWAT team to my house. I woke up in the middle of the night to a bunch of dudes armed to the teeth pounding on my door. After that, I was a nervous wreck. I scrubbed my online profile so they couldn’t find me again, went to the dark side of the internet. And got out of town in a hurry.”

  “Why acting?” I said.

  She shrugged. “I was looking for something as far from the tech world as possible. I thought, Fine. Let’s see what it’s like being a pretty face.” I had to admire the way she owned it, plainly and without the standard self-deprecating gestures. “To tell you the truth, I sucked, but I kept getting auditions because of my looks.”