How to Love (9 page)

“We didn’t make up yet,” I told him.

“Reena.” That was Soledad, coming closer, but I stepped away, out of her reach.

“I’m serious,” I said, and my voice was louder this time. I was having a hard time getting what was going on. “We weren’t—we were …”

I trailed off as Soledad wrapped her arms around me, stood there loose-limbed and bewildered while she whispered Spanish prayers into my ear. “I’m not
kidding
,” I told her, voice cracking. I felt my ribs start to collapse. I looked up one last time before I stopped remembering anything, just in time to see the sharp, jagged pleat of Sawyer’s backbone as I watched him slip out the sliding doors.

Aaron and I have a date planned for Friday night, so I meet him down at the marina at the end of his shift. I stroll along the wide, weathered dock and find him chatting with Lorraine, a big-haired retiree from New Jersey whose taste in clothing definitely skews toward the noisy: At the moment, she’s wearing cheetah-print leggings. She and her husband, Hank, have been docking their boat, the
Hanky Panky
, at the marina for fifteen years, but every time I see her she makes a big show of telling me how Aaron’s her favorite mechanic.

“Ree-na,” she calls cheerfully when she sees me, waving her straw hat in greeting. Lorraine treats everybody like a long-lost friend. “I was at your place the other night! The
short ribs were di-vine. I told Hank he was going to have to roll me home.”

We chat for a bit about the restaurant, how crowded the Intracoastal’s been. Eventually Hank turns up, ruddy and heavyset, and they send us “young people” on our way. Aaron slides his hand into the back pocket of my jeans as we head for the car. “I’ve got a pair of pants just like hers,” he tells me quietly, and I throw my head back and laugh.

Aaron is appalled that I’ve lived fifteen minutes from the ocean my entire life and have somehow never eaten a lobster roll, so he takes me to this divey place on a pier in Lauderdale, picnic benches and beer in plastic cups. Souvenir shops glow white and neon along the beachfront. Tourists wander by in various stages of sunburned undress.

“This is a Maine thing, though!” I protest, pulling a handful of napkins from the dispenser on the table. “Aren’t lobster rolls a Maine thing?”

Aaron shrugs. “Maine, schmaine,” he says, then laughs. “I mean, yes. These are probably Yankee lobsters, which means they hauled their slow crustacean selves all the way down here so that you could have this experience, so
probably
you should quit complaining.”

“I’m not complaining,” I tell him, and smile. There’s a pile of onion rings on a plate between us. The last of the sunset catches the gold in his hair. “Actually, I’m happy as a clam.”

Aaron groans. “Was that a seafood pun?” he asks, and I cackle dorkily. “Really?
Really?
”

After Aaron finished high school in New Hampshire, he worked on fishing boats in Gloucester, Massachusetts, for a couple of years before he moved to Florida at the beginning of the summer. He picked up Shelby from work every night for two weeks before I realized he wasn’t doing it to make Shelby’s life easier.

“You realize I’m not fun,” I told him, the first time he asked me out. “I have a kid. I’m not fun. Even before I had a kid, I wasn’t fun.”

“You’re totally boring,” he agreed, nodding seriously. We were standing on the sidewalk outside Antonia’s after eleven, the smell of heat and car exhaust and the ocean somewhere underneath. “Definitely.” Then he laughed, and it felt like something warm and liquid cracking open inside my chest. “How’s this weekend?” he asked, and that was that.

Tonight we finish our sandwiches and wander down the beach for a while in the dark. The sand is gritty and familiar beneath my feet. I chat to him for a while about the classes I’m taking, lit and art history and accounting at the community college in Broward, a last-ditch attempt to keep my brain from turning to soup inside my head.

“We still on for Saturday?” he asks, when we’re back at my car. We kiss up against the side of it for a while, the faint zing of peppermint gum behind his teeth, but Cade and Stefanie have the baby, and I promised I’d pick her up by ten.

“Absolutely,” I say with a grin, though in truth I totally forgot until right now. There’s a barbecue at his mom’s house, a family thing with Shelby and everybody that he told me about last week. At some point I’m going to have to make a salad. “Pick us up around one?”

“Will do.” Aaron kisses me good-bye and knocks twice on the roof before I go,
Get home safe
. The lights look like a carnival in the rearview.

*

Hannah fights me on her nap the next morning, and we’re already running a little behind by the time I get her changed and make it down to the kitchen to finish packing the diaper bag. I bump the swinging door open with one hip and find Sawyer standing there, dressed in his work clothes, looking at the baby pictures on the fridge. I freeze. “Wha—?”

“I didn’t know you were here,” he says immediately, trying to head me off at the pass before I can lay into him. “My dad just needed to drop some paperwork off for your dad. Your car wasn’t—I didn’t know you were here.”

“It was making a noise,” I say. I stop in the doorway and watch him for a second, remembering: I used to find him like this all the time when we were together, just hanging out in my house as if he lived here, or wanted to. I swallow, hold the baby a little tighter. “Cade took it in this morning.”

Sawyer nods. “You said stay away from you.”

“I did.” I bounce Hannah on my hip and rummage around in the fridge for the lidded cups of juice I put there
last night, her pudgy hands rooting through my hair. It feels claustrophobic in here, like the walls are closing in. Our kitchen is small and outdated, a dark, awkward afterthought of a space. “I was being dramatic.”

Sawyer shrugs. “You’re allowed.”

“I wasn’t asking for permission.” The baby moves from my hair to my earring, yanking a little, and I do my best to disentangle her without dropping an armful of Tupperware. “Hannah, baby,” I mutter, nudging her away as gently as I can. “Love of my earthly life.”

Sawyer takes a tentative step closer. “Need a hand?”

“Nope.” I don’t even think about it, it just comes right out, like the mean thing to say is always on the tip of my tongue. Then I sigh. “You want to hold her?” I ask.

He looks genuinely surprised, which makes me feel kind of shitty. “Yeah,” he says, right away. “Yeah, if that’s okay.”

So I take a deep breath and hand over my baby girl—watching the placement of his hands, her head, even though she’s way too old for me to have to worry about that, and anyway he’s absurdly careful, like he’s holding a bomb. He looks totally, nakedly terrified. I almost laugh.

Hannah whimpers for a moment like she’s going to start to fuss, and he dances around a little to stave off her cries. “Hey there, Hannah,” he says, once she relaxes. “Hey, pretty girl.”

Hannah smiles like the fog burning off in the morning. I glance sharply away. This close together they look so,
so
alike, olive skin and their sharp, intelligent faces. It makes my heart swoop sort of unpleasantly, a pinball machine on
tilt
. “Hi!” she says cheerfully.

Sawyer stares a moment. “She talks?” he asks, clearly surprised.

“I mean, she’s a human person,” I say snottily, then: “Sorry.” I give him some room, fingertips curling around the back of a kitchen chair. “That was—sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Sawyer shrugs, looks for a minute at the apple curve of Hannah’s cheek. “You get that I didn’t know, right?” he says quietly.

I flinch and clear my throat, glancing carefully away. “Know what?” I ask, all ignorance, as vanilla-bland as humanly possible.

“Please don’t.” Sawyer’s green eyes darken; there’s a set to his moody jaw. “Look,” he says. “You get to hate me. That’s … whatever. That’s okay. But don’t jerk me around about this, Reena. If she’s not mine—”

“Are you
kidding
me?” I gape at him, because seriously, the
balls
. “Of course she is!” In some kind of bizarre reflexive counter-illustration of my point, I snatch the baby out of his arms. Hannah startles. “Jesus Christ, Sawyer—”

“Well, then just say that!” Sawyer shakes his head. “Reena, I didn’t call anybody. Nobody knew how to find me. You know that. I didn’t know you were—if I’d have
known
, then—”

“Then what, exactly?” I snap. “You’d have stepped up? Or you’d have offered to pay for me to—”

“Don’t,” he interrupts, looking not at me but at the baby. “Come on. That sucks. That’s shitty.”

“Am I
wrong
?”

“Yes!” he explodes, and then hesitates, rubbing hard at the back of his neck. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” I tell him. I shove a container of Goldfish and some grapes into the baby bag, packing up one-handed. “That’s what I thought.”

Sawyer shakes his head again, frustrated, like I’m being deliberately obtuse. “I have no idea what I would have done, Reena. You know what I was like. I was screwed up. That’s why I left to begin with.” He sighs loudly, scrubs a hand over his bristly head. “But I’m here now.”

I hitch Hannah up on my hip. “Evidently.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Sawyer tells me, ignoring the acidic coat of sarcasm on my words. He moves deftly out of my way as I bounce around the kitchen, like he can anticipate where I’m going to go next. “I want to be here. I want to do whatever I can do to be a part of this.”

I open my mouth to say something snotty, then close it again. Suddenly I am so, so tired. I am tired like I’ve had two years of no sleep at all. “Okay,” I tell him. “Fine.”

Sawyer’s eyes widen, like he was expecting me to tell him to go screw off. I guess I can’t exactly blame him. “Okay?”

I shrug. “That’s what I said.”

We stand there for a minute, a cautious détente. I wait. The baby rests her heavy head on my shoulder like she’s bored of us, settling in.

“What about the park?” Sawyer asks, after a measure or two.

I blink at him. “The park?”

“Public place,” Sawyer explains, picking Hannah’s baby sunglasses up off the counter and handing them to me. “Middle of the day.”

I roll my eyes, but I take the glasses. “Oh, stop it,” I say.

“Made you smile.”

“Congratulations,” I tell him, snorting a bit. I perch the sunglasses on top of Hannah’s head, careful. She only likes to wear them about half the time.

Sawyer is grinning. “How’s tomorrow?”

I sigh. “Tomorrow is fine.”

“Reena, sweetheart—” Soledad pokes her head through the swinging door into the kitchen and stops cold when she sees us. Her dark eyebrows twitch.

“Ma’am,” Sawyer says. If he was wearing a hat he would tip it, I’m sure.

“Hi, Sawyer.” To me, pointedly: “Aaron is here.”

“Yup.” I heft the baby bag onto my shoulder, brush Hannah’s dark cap of baby hair out of her face. “I’ll be out in a sec.”

“So,” Sawyer says, once she’s gone, and of course now he’s going to push his luck. “Aaron.”

I roll my eyes. “I have a boyfriend, Sawyer, Jesus. I know that’s difficult to believe, but—”

“It’s not difficult.”

“Well.” I don’t know what to say to that, exactly. My heart is tapping away against my ribs. “Okay. I’ll see you.”

“Absolutely,” he says, but he follows me out of the kitchen like a shadow and I know he knows exactly what he’s doing. Aaron is standing in the living room, half watching the TV Soledad left on, shorts and flip-flops and an easy, unhurried grin.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” says Aaron.

“Hi,” says Sawyer.

We stand there, the three of us. We look at one another. Soledad’s got an expression on her face like she thinks I’ve lost my mind. “Aaron,” she says, when it’s clear I have no intention of making any kind of introduction. “This is Sawyer. Sawyer, Aaron.”

“Good to meet you,” says Aaron.

“Likewise,” says Sawyer.

“Well!” I say brightly. In a second I’m going to burst out laughing, but only to avoid some other, less desirable reaction. “We’ve gotta go.”

Sawyer nods slowly. He gazes at Aaron and then at me. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, the faintest hint of a smirk at the edges of his mouth.

Smug bastard. “Yup,” I say. “Bye.” I kiss Soledad and
grab Aaron by the wrist, screen door smacking soundly shut behind us. I pretty much run to the car.

“So,” Aaron says, when we’re buckled. “That was him.”

I have never, in all the time we’ve known each other, said a single word to Aaron about Sawyer. “Yeah,” I tell him after a moment. “That was him.”

Aaron turns the key in the ignition. “I thought he’d be taller,” is all he says.

I got stung by a wasp the morning of Allie’s funeral service. It was three wet, humid days after she wrapped her cute little car around a tree three blocks outside her parents’ development, thus leaving this world for the next in a spectacular act of theatrical
stupidity
so distinctly Allie that in some crazy, perverse way it made me miss her even more than I already did.

She’d been drunk, was the news that spread through school the week it happened, her blood alcohol level a tenth of a point over the legal limit for an adult in the state of Florida, never mind that Allie was sixteen years old. Grief counselors set up shop in the office. We sat through a mandatory assembly about the dangers of drunk driving;
kids pinned purple ribbons to the straps of their backpacks. Apparently Lauren Werner got questioned by the cops.

It was Wednesday, and raining. I kept waiting to cry.

A flaming red welt the size of a walnut on the back of my knee seemed as good a reason as any to give up on this particular day, and I camped out in bed from the time we got home from church until Soledad knocked on my door just before the dinner rush. “Enough, girlfriend,” she said, hitting the switch and filling the room with tepid yellow light. “You gotta get up.”

“I’m sleeping,” I muttered into the pillow, even though I wasn’t. I’d spent the afternoon hidden under the quilt and wide awake, tracing the wobbly line of a crack in the plaster ceiling and waiting for her footsteps on the stairs. My knee itched and smarted. I’d scratched until it bled.