How to Love (10 page)

“Cade says you’re on the schedule for tonight.”

“Cade’s a filthy liar.”

I heard my father pause in the doorway, the slow cadence of his heavy tread. The AC swished and muttered, asthmatic. “Leave her be, Sol. I can call somebody to fill in.”

“Leo—” she began, ready to fight him. I think I was freaking her out.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, throwing off the quilt. “I’ll get up.”

“Are you sure?” My father was unconvinced. I wondered if he was thinking about my mother, about funeral flowers and headstones and lives cut short too soon. I wondered
what would have happened if I asked him. We hardly ever talked about my mom.

“Sure,” I lied instead, heaving my heavy self up off the mattress. “I’ll meet you at the car in ten minutes.”

“He’s worried about you,” Soledad said when he was gone, opening my closet and reaching for my black work pants. Her long, dark hair hung loosely down her back.

I swung my feet over the side of the bed and shrugged. “You’re not?”

“I’m waiting for you to
talk
to me, Reena. But if you don’t want to do that—”

“I have to get dressed,” I interrupted, “if you want me to go to work.”

“Watch your tone, please.” Soledad tossed the pants in my direction, plus a white blouse that had, frankly, seen better days. She’d asked me three times what had happened the night of the accident, where I’d been and why I’d lied and what I was doing with Sawyer to begin with. She thought I was holding out on purpose, a surly teenager thing, or that maybe I’d been at the party myself and knew something I wasn’t saying. I couldn’t tell her that the truth was a million times worse. “But fine, have it your way. You might want to put a little blush on before you go.”

I frowned. “Thanks a lot.”

“It’s after five, sweetheart. I’m trying to move things along. Put something on that leg, too, or you’ll be at it all night.”

The restaurant was packed, the soupy heat of summer in Florida overcoming the industrial air-conditioning, sweat pooling in the creases of my elbows. Sawyer was missing from behind the overflowing bar. “Hiya, chickie,” his dad greeted me instead, pulling pint glasses from the dishwasher and arranging them in towering stacks beside the taps. Roger was tall and solid, quick smile and a temper to match. He flipped up the hatch and came toward me, slung a familiar arm around my shoulders. “You hangin’ in?”

I nodded, extricated myself as politely as I could manage. I really didn’t feel like being touched. “I’m okay,” I told him, the lie like a getaway car. All I wanted was for nobody to talk to me for the foreseeable future, to curl myself up into the smallest of balls and disappear.

The night melted by. I delivered order after order of Finch’s cornmeal-fried catfish and smiled blandly at dozens of customers, losing myself in the hum and clatter of forks on plates and the steady one-two step of the band set up by the bar. I’d almost managed to wipe every stray thought from my head when I rounded a corner, slammed into one of the cocktail waitresses, and sent a full tray crashing to the tile floor.

It was only a couple of dishes, broken china the busboys could take care of in under a minute, but it was enough to completely undo me. I hurried through the breezeway toward the patio, ducking around a barback and squeezing
past the line for the ladies’ room. My heart was a trembling snare inside my chest.
Why did you think you could do this?
I wondered desperately, edging around one of the prep cooks idling on his break.
It’s not working.

“What’s not working?” That was Cade, materializing behind me in all his football-star, Abercrombie glory and catching my arm. I hadn’t even realized I’d spoken aloud and was burning under his close big-brother scrutiny. I really, really didn’t want to talk.

“Too hot in here,” I muttered, brushing past him. “Patio open?”

“It’s raining,” he warned even as he stepped back. I think he was afraid of me, too.

“It’s always raining. I’ll be fine.”

I left him behind and pushed through the double glass doors. The sprawling back patio was sanctuary-silent, deserted owing to the rain, which, I realized now as I stood beneath it, wasn’t really rain at all but the kind of sneaky mist you can’t even feel until the moment you notice you’re somehow soaking wet. Milkweed wound through the wrought-iron fence; white lights twinkled in the palm trees. A few deep breaths and my frantic heart had almost slowed before I realized I wasn’t alone.

“Oh!” I yelped when I saw him, sitting with his head bent and his elbows on his knees on the giant glider at the far end of the yard. It was reflex, just the one skittish syllable. I stopped so fast I almost tripped.

Sawyer glanced up with the barest flicker of interest, stared like he didn’t know who I was. I’d seen him that morning at the funeral and the blankness of his expression had intrigued me, made me wonder if there was anything beating and alive beneath it. Even close up, there was no way to tell.

“Sorry,” I said, almost over my shoulder as I turned to run away from this place forever, or probably just for tonight. We hadn’t talked since the scene at the hospital. I couldn’t imagine what we’d possibly begin to say. “I didn’t … nobody told me you were out here. Sorry.”

“No,” Sawyer said, not entirely friendly. “You’re all right. Stay.”

I stopped and looked at him. He was still wearing his clothes from that morning, gray tie hanging loose from his neck, funeral shoes shining like onyx. In church he’d kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. “I don’t think—I should really—”

“I mean it.” He glanced at me sideways. “Don’t look so scared, Serena. I’m not going to hurt you.”

God, that wasn’t what I was afraid of, not by a long shot: What
scared
me was that I was a person capable of still feeling the things I felt for him after everything that had happened. What scared me was that my best friend was gone. Sawyer was the one person in the world who could maybe understand that, the one person who knew what we’d done, and for a second I almost told him everything: why Allie and I
had stopped being friends to begin with, how I’d wanted him for so long I didn’t even remember what it was like not to. In the end I chickened out instead. “I’m not,” I lied, shaking my head like even the idea was ridiculous.

Sawyer snorted, a low animal noise. He slid over and made room. “Prove it,” he said.

“I … Fine.” Annoyed and bewildered and unprepared, I crossed the expanse of patio between us and perched carefully on the edge of the glider. He smelled faintly of soap and sweat and the air was warmer near him, like his body gave off more heat than normal. “Here I am.”

“Here you are.” He was holding a half-empty green bottle and he ran his thumb once around the rim, offered it to me without looking me in the face. “You working?”

“Yeah.” I took it from him, wrapping my hands around the cool glass and hoping he wouldn’t notice if I didn’t actually drink any of it. “Well, sort of.” There was a feeling in my chest like a moth against a windowpane, the desperate scrape of wings. “I just broke a bunch of plates.”

Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “On purpose?” he asked.

“No.”

“No,” he repeated, looking at me finally, smiling a small, languid smile I’d seen a hundred times before in the decade and a half I’d lived on his periphery. “I guess not.”

Sawyer sighed. I waited. We sat quiet as death and just as still and listened to the wasps as they sang their elegies high in the leaves above our heads.

Aaron and Shelby’s mom lives in a kitschy little bungalow out in Poinsettia Heights, cool tile floors and spiny green succulents exploding like alien life-forms all over the raised deck that surrounds the pool. Hannah’s in heaven, drifting through the cool blue water in her yellow plastic baby raft, no shortage of middle-aged women in neon-flowered bathing suits to coo over her and her star-shaped kiddie sunglasses.

Eventually her small fingers go pruney, and we climb carefully up onto the deck, water from my hair running in cold rivulets down my back. Hannah’s body feels cool and slippery, like a seal’s. I wrap her in a hooded towel that looks like a bug-eyed frog and take her inside to get changed,
stopping in the kitchen on our way back to pull some snacks out of the bag I packed this morning. Shelby’s rooting around in the fridge for a lime to go with her beer. “Was wondering where you got to,” she says, holding out the bottle. She’s wearing cargo shorts and flip-flops, wet hair knotted at the nape of her neck. “You want?”

I glance over the line of baby cacti on the windowsill, taking in the big, inclusive tribe in the yard. “I’m not going to drink underage in front of your entire family.”

“Oh, like anybody cares. You’re already here with your illegitimate child and they all love you. Speaking of: What about you, baby girl?” she says to Hannah. “Mai tai? Margarita?” She glances at me, frowns. “What?” she asks. “I’m kidding. I’m not actually going to make your kid a margarita. She’s a baby. That would be bad form.”

“Huh?” I blink at her, distracted, still gazing out at the crowd on the deck. “No, no. I’m sorry. I wasn’t even really listening.”

“Well,
thanks
,” she says faux-snottily. Then, bumping my shoulder with hers: “Hey. How you doing over there?”

I shrug, trying for a bright smile and probably missing. “I’m fine,” I promise. “Not really sleeping so well.”

“Yeah.” Shelby breaks off as two of her teenage cousins amble through the kitchen, bony elbows and legs like gazelles. “Look,” she says, when we’re alone again. “You can talk to me. I know it’s weird now because you date my goony brother and you’re hanging out with all my fat aunts
and whatnot, but you talked to me before that and, you know. It doesn’t mean you can’t tell me stuff. You can tell me stuff.”

I hand the baby her Goldfish, stalling, but it’s useless to do that with Shelby. She waits me out every time. “Sawyer was at my house today,” I confess finally, eating a couple of crackers myself for good measure. “We had, you know,
the talk
.”

“The
I know we’re really Catholic but this is where babies come from
talk?” Shelby laughs, blue eyes going wide. “No offense, Reena, but you probably should have had that one like, two years ago, you know what I’m saying?”

“Oh, you’re very funny.” I make a face. “The
we made a baby and here she is
talk, smartass.”

“Ooh,” she says, leaning back against the counter with her beer bottle, clicking the glass mouth lightly against her front teeth. “
That
talk. How’d it go?”

“Fine,” I say again. “I don’t know. Nothing the rest of the universe didn’t know already, right? We’re going to hang out tomorrow, all three of us.”

“As a family?” she blurts, and I physically startle at the sound of it. Is that what we are, the three of us? That can’t possibly be what we are.

“Um, yeah,” I say after a moment. “I guess so.”

“Well.” Shelby’s quiet, and I know from experience that she’s working the logic of it out in her mind like some kind of medical puzzle: muscle and tendon, cartilage and bone.

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it? I mean, for better or for worse, Sawyer is your—”

“Don’t say it,” I plead, knowing what’s coming. Shelby loves this particular phrase.

“—baby daddy. There’s bound to be some big feelings there, or whatever, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be in your kid’s life. Right, Hannah?” she asks, taking the orange cracker the baby proffers, kissing her crumby hand. “You want your hot but degenerate father to take you to Disney World and stuff, don’t you?”

I laugh, I can’t help it. “Can you cut it out?” I beg.

“I’m teasing. I’m sorry, I’m not being helpful.” She slips her free arm around my waist as we head back out into the sunshine and noise. “Just, you know, don’t forget all the shitty stuff he did. And remember that you’re happy now.”

“Yeah,” I tell her, still distracted, glancing at the crowd around the table. Shelby’s uncles are arguing politics good-naturedly; her cousins are playing a noisy game of Marco Polo. I think again of families, hers and mine and Sawyer’s, of what exactly they look like and what exactly they do.

Shelby’s looking at me hard. “You
are
happy now, aren’t you?” she asks.

At the grill, Aaron is burning a hot dog because that’s how I like to eat them, a cloud of smoke like a dark corona around his face. “Yeah,” I repeat, more certainly this time. “Yeah, of course.”

Sawyer pretty much disappeared the summer after Allie died, lying so low as to go practically subterranean, skulking around bars on the seedier side of Broward and getting into loud, rowdy fights. In June he got arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge. In July he wound up with a broken hand. In August he finally mentioned to his parents that, by the way, he had no intention whatsoever of shipping off to college like he was supposed to, which, while not exactly a revelation to anybody following along at home, had Roger and Lydia practically apoplectic and turned the restaurant into a backdrop for all kinds of huge LeGrande family drama.

“His dad flipped the hell out,” Cade told me on the ride home one night, the rain a steady patter on the windshield,
the wipers a rhythmic swoosh. It’s a myth that boys don’t like to gossip: Cade in particular couldn’t keep a secret to save his life. “Said he had to move out of the house if he didn’t go to school. They dropped a lot of money on his tuition deposit.”

“That’s what I figured.” The LeGrandes were richer than us, I knew, but not rich enough that things like college deposits didn’t matter. Still, I suspected Lydia would probably be more upset than anyone else: Sawyer was, after all, the one living soul she never had a critical word for. Even if she’d never admit it to anyone, I could only imagine how much his apparent commitment to complete and total self-immolation got under her skin.

It got under mine, too, obviously, but it wasn’t like I was going to say that out loud.

The college thing sort of made sense to me, though. Even before everything happened, I remember thinking how odd it was that he was headed to FSU,
Go Seminoles
, just like every other senior in the state—how
pedestrian
, as if somebody like Sawyer should be headed for pastures way greener than keg parties or freshman seminars on the history of Western civilization. He should have been haunting cafés in New York or playing open mics in California, slouching around looking beautiful and waiting to get discovered.