How to Love (12 page)

“Well, what is it? It’s like, a—What’s the word? It starts with a P.” That was Cade, leaning against the bar in his discount-warehouse suit—he’d gotten promoted that fall, was managing days and some weekends. He and his fiancée, Stef, were saving up to buy a house.

“It’s a plasma,” Sawyer said. He was unloading glasses
from the dishwasher behind the bar, and he smiled at me as I approached. “Here, ask Reena. Reena will know.”

“What will I know?” I set my plate full of pancakes on the bar and hopped up on a stool. My hair was falling out of its braid, I could feel it.

“Okay,” said Cade, around a mouthful of bar pretzels. “Reena. If I throw a bucket of blood on you”—he paused dramatically—“are you wet?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Are you wet,” my father repeated, like this was somehow a logical question. He was festive and silly tonight—he got like that sometimes, around the boys. It made him seem younger than he was.

I set my fork down. “First of all, that’s disgusting. Second of all”—I turned to Sawyer—“why is that something I would know?”

“’Cause you’re smart,” he replied reasonably. “And smart people know stuff.”

“Oh, well, in that case.” I rolled my eyes, dorkily pleased. I’d taken the SATs again that morning, as a matter of fact, trying to pull my math score up even more—the next in a logical sequence of steps, I thought, toward getting the hell out of town. “Anyway, I think he’s right. I think you’re more sticky than you are wet.”

“Ha. Good girl,” my father said, vindicated. He kissed the top of my head. “I’m going to get out of here before Soledad calls the police. You want to come with me, or have Cade drive you after he closes?”

“Um.” I hesitated, looking in every conceivable direction except for the one I wanted to be looking in. I should have gone home, actually—I’d joined the school paper at Ms. Bowen’s behest and was writing an Around Town column about street festivals and new stores on Federal Highway. I had 250 words on a sculpture park near the beach due first thing Monday morning. “I can stick around for a while.”

Sawyer noticed my plate once my father had gone and Cade, flush with his new managerial responsibilities, went back to the office to run the night’s totals. “Aw, not fair,” he said, his face a sad, silly caricature. “Finch made you pancakes?”

I nodded happily, digging into the fluffy stack sitting on my plate. “Finch loves me.”

“And really, who can blame him?” Sawyer hooked a pair of wineglasses onto the rack above his head. Then he reached across the bar, took my fork out of my hand, and helped himself to a big bite.

“Oh, come on!” I cried, playing at irritated. “Get your own.”

“Yours are better,” he said, mouth full.

I huffed a little, delighted and trying not to look it. “You know, not all of us want your germs.”

“Reena,” he replied mildly, handing back the fork. “You already got my germs.”

I froze for just one second, and then I started to laugh. It was the closest we’d come to talking about it—the only
indication he’d given me that he even remembered it had happened—and hearing him say it loosened some knot I hadn’t even realized was pressing on the muscles in my chest. I giggled like a maniac for a minute, absurdly relieved, crazy hyena giggles, like I hadn’t laughed in a year. “Shut up,” I managed, once I finally got my breath.

“There you go, Reena.” Sawyer grinned, revealing two perfectly straight rows of white teeth. “You’re so serious all the time, I swear. I crack you and it makes my damn night.”

“Yeah, well.” I took a breath, calmed down a bit. “I do what I can.”

“Mm-hmm.” Sawyer wandered over to the piano and made himself comfortable on the bench. Though my father put a down payment on Antonia’s all those years ago in part so he’d always have a place to play his music, it only took a couple of months for him to realize that the care and keeping of a restaurant required more time and effort than he had anticipated. Now he sat at the baby grand only once or twice a month, a special occasion. The rest of the time, he booked bands.

“Any requests, ma’am?” Sawyer asked, clever hands already splayed over the keys. He started with a few quick scales, flew through the opening of a Dave Matthews song that was one of Cade’s favorites, then launched into some West Coast–style jazz I knew my father must have taught him. Dave Brubeck, I recognized after a moment. Car-commercial music.

Is there anything you’re not good at?
I wanted to ask him, but I just smiled, reached behind me, and pulled the rubber band out of my hair. “Play whatever you want. I’ll just listen.”

“I wish everybody was that easy. Come sit.”

I slid off the barstool and onto the piano bench. Somewhere in the back of my head I thought of the old pictures I’d seen of my parents sitting at the upright in my grandmother’s house, the dark gaze of my mother, Antonia herself, fixed on my father’s young face as he played.

“You should wear your hair down more,” Sawyer said, glancing at me, hands moving fast through a piece I didn’t know. Our thighs were touching. “It looks nice like that.”

I laughed, but Sawyer just shook his head. “I’m serious,” he said, still playing. His voice went low and quiet. “I noticed you, you know that? Even before last spring I did.”

Before last spring you were dating my dead best friend
, I thought and didn’t say. Instead I hedged. “That so?”

“Yeah.” Sawyer shrugged. “You’re just … different.”

“Different,” I repeated. I thought of Lauren Werner, of the fact that at this very moment, everybody else in my grade was at Homecoming except for me. I got tired of being different, is the truth of it. It wore on me. “What, from Allie?”

That was the wrong thing to say. Sawyer kept his fingers on the keys, didn’t miss a chord, but his whole body tensed. I thought of the strings inside the piano. “Sorry,” I said, backpedaling. I hadn’t even meant to bring her up, not
overtly—she was just on my mind so much, still, like the six months since the car crash hadn’t done anything to dull how much I missed her. You’d think losing her almost a full year before she actually died would have cushioned the blow, somehow; instead I just felt it more and more. “I shouldn’t have—I just meant—”

“It’s fine,” Sawyer said shortly, but for the first time all night I didn’t like the sound of his voice. I wondered how much he thought about her. I wondered if he thought about her at all.

“Okay, but …”

“I said it’s okay, Reena.”

We sat in awkward, testy silence for a moment until Cade emerged from the kitchen. “Taking requests?” he asked, then noticed our stony faces and looked, sort of accusingly, at Sawyer. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said too loudly, keeping my expression as neutral as humanly possible and feeling certain that I’d just pulled this apart, whatever it even was, faster than I’d known it could be destroyed. “Everything’s great.”

I’ve got a midterm to take in the Modern American Novel, a class I was sort of excited about when it turned up in the Broward College course catalog last semester, which just goes to show how delusional I really am. For some reason I was picturing lively, sophisticated conversations about the great writers of the last few generations; instead the lecture is delivered by a fleshy middle-aged professor who’s not so much boring as blatantly bored, who eyes us with vague pity through an owly pair of glasses and periodically administers multiple-choice quizzes I’m fairly certain he’s printing off the Internet. “You are my penance for a misspent life,” he announced on the first day of class, before assigning
The Things They Carried
and two books by John Updike and
pretty much washing his hands of us entirely. I like to imagine that one of these days I’ll be able to walk into a class at Broward without thinking of Ms. Bowen and how disappointed she’d be, but to be honest it hasn’t happened yet.

This morning I park my car and head down the chilly hallway toward the classroom, past the bulletin board with flyers for intramural flag football games and two-for-one happy hour at a bar near campus. Par for the course, I don’t have a hell of a lot in common with my classmates, although I feel like at this point that’s absolutely more my fault than theirs. I’ve been to coffee a couple of times with some girls from my accounting class, but for the most part my time at BC has not been the social bonanza Shelby hoped it might be. Basically it feels a lot like high school, only without gym.

I sit down at one of the long tables and tick the appropriate boxes with my number 2 pencil, then hand in my test at the front of the room where good old Professor Orrin is reading the
Atlantic
on his phone. He nods at me distractedly before returning his attention to the screen. I hurry down the stairs into the parking lot, cross the shimmering black-top to where my car sits waiting. There’s more than fiction on my mind today.

Allie’s old house has been empty for ages: Her parents moved to Tampa not long after the accident, and the new owners foreclosed inside a year. It just sits there in the swooping curve of the cul-de-sac now, gap-toothed and vaguely haunted-looking, waiting for whatever’s coming next.

Allie’s buried at Forest Lawn, but I’ve never been much for cemeteries, and anyway, whoever’s beneath that headstone—
beloved angel, darling girl
—that’s not the Allie I knew. And maybe the girl I fought with all those nights ago in the unforgiving glare of the patio light wasn’t the Allie I knew, either, but sometimes I can still find her here in her old backyard. I come by to look every now and again, if it’s summer or I’m lonely or afraid.

This afternoon, though—half a week since our date at the playground, who knows how long since my father looked me in the eye—I’m not the only one hanging around the Ballards’ old development. Sawyer’s rusty Jeep is parked in the driveway, unmistakable. I shake my head, disbelieving, as if there’s some invisible string that kept us tethered the entire time he was away and that’s tightening now, a slip-knot hooked around my wrist.

“You’re trespassing, you know,” I call, wandering across the scruffy expanse of dry, brown grass, Allie’s dad’s beloved lawn gone wild and weedy. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that things change whether you’re around to notice them or not.

“I know,” he says. “What are you doing here?”

“What am
I
doing here?” I sit down on the swing next to him just like we sat all those nights ago outside the party, rubber burning the backs of my thighs. “What are
you
doing here?”

Sawyer shrugs. “I was in the neighborhood. I don’t
know. I feel like I never really …” He trails off, going quiet, one sneaker toeing the ground. “I think about her sometimes, you know?”

“Yeah,” I tell him, which is an understatement. “I do.”

“I thought about her a lot while I was gone.” He raises his head to look at me, like a challenge. “Thought about you, too.”

I ignore that last part, shaking my head a little as I gaze across the yard at the empty patio, the darkened windows filmed with grime. I grew up in this yard—Allie and I slept out here every summer, the two of us in a pup tent with a Coleman camping lantern and a radio, listening to the Top 40 countdown. In second grade I tumbled off these monkey bars and fractured both my wrists. “She’d be in college,” I tell him. “If she hadn’t … if she’d lived. We both would be, maybe.”

Sawyer nods slowly. “Maybe,” he agrees, eyes narrowing the slightest bit, like he’s trying to figure out how much of it I blame him for. I don’t know if it’s more or less than he thinks.

“She was gonna go to Barnard,” I continue. It feels a little bit like finding my voice to say it after all this time. “And I was going to come to New York after college, and we were going to get some fancy apartment by Central Park and dress up for regular life. She always said that, when we were younger—that we’d dress up for regular life.” I gaze down at my shorts and T-shirt, a loose-fitting Red Sox
ringer Shelby brought back from school for me. “As you can see, I’ve really taken that sentiment to heart.”

Sawyer smiles. “For what it’s worth,” he says, dark eyebrows arcing, “I think you look arty.”

He bumps at my ankle, careful. After a moment I bump at his in return.

“So,” Sawyer said out of nowhere, “did you ever finish your essay?”

“What?” I blinked at him. I was sitting at a back table, wrapping silverware into little white-cloth-napkin burritos, one leg tucked under me. It was almost Thanksgiving of junior year. Sawyer and I had edged around each other for weeks since the night on the piano bench, careful; I tracked his distant orbit from the corner of my eye. The restaurant rustled, steady, a current ferrying us through. “My essay?”

“The travel guide thing,” he elaborated. A gray undershirt peeked out from beneath the collar of his button-down. “For Northwestern.”

“Yeah, no, I know what you’re talking about.” I finished with the roll-ups, stacked the last of them into a wicker basket on the tabletop. “I just didn’t think you remembered that.”

“Well,” he said, shrugging, “I do.”

Imagine that. “It’s almost done,” I told him. In fact, I was halfway through my third draft of the stupid thing, sure there was something important I was leaving out. Ms. Bowen had looked at it, and so had my English teacher. Noelle, the snippy blond editor of the school paper, had read a copy and pronounced it
satisfactory
, which out of her mouth was actually a huge compliment—up to her standards, maybe. But not to mine. “Just fixing a few more things.”

“That’s cool. I still wanna see it.” He hesitated a minute, just standing there with his hands shoved in his pockets, watching me. “You got a break right now?” he asked. “I’m supposed to pick up some CDs from Animal.”

I felt my eyebrows rise. “Animal?”

“He’s my drummer.”

“Like in
Muppet Babies
?”

“Yeah, like in
Muppet Babies
.” Sawyer grinned. “Come on, come with me. We’ll stop and grab you a soda or something. Whatever the kids are drinking these days.”

“Absinthe, mostly,” I said, hesitating, not wanting to let on just how much I’d been hoping for an invitation like this one these past few weeks. Finally, taking a breath: “Sure, okay.” I stood up, untied my apron. “Just let me tell my dad I’m going.”