How to Love Page 2

  I was watching carefully. They knew each other, sure, from any number of family parties, birthdays, and graduations. They passed each other in the hallways at school. They weren’t friends, though, not by any stretch of the imagination, which was why I was so surprised when he grinned back, slow and easy. “No kidding,” he told her, tipping his chin in her direction. “Long time no see.”

  3

  After

  “Sawyer LeGrande is home?”

  I’m livid when I stomp into the house a full two hours ahead of schedule, back from the 7-Eleven and banging my way into the kitchen with all the grace and equanimity of a hand grenade. I’ve been driving in panicky circles through the still-biblical downpour like if I don’t keep moving something bad is going to happen, like chance favors those in motion and the odds are already stacked. Outside, the palm trees bend in supplication. My car stalled at three different lights.

  “What?” Soledad snaps to attention. She’s been chopping carrots at the counter and the knife clatters into the basin; she swears softly in Spanish before jerking her thumb to her mouth. Hannah, who’s sitting in her high chair macerating a gritty-skinned tomato from my father’s garden, begins to shriek. She’s small and dark-haired and fierce, my girl; when she really puts her mind to it, her howl can seem to come from a creature ten times her size. “Mama,” she wails, that last long a like the universe has totally wronged her. I tuck her against the curve of my body and begin to pace like some nervous feline, a lioness or lynx.

  “It’s okay,” I lie, whispering nonsense until she quiets, watery pulp slipping through her chubby fists. “That was scary. I know. It’s okay.” I look back at my stepmother, who’s still sucking the blood from her finger and staring at me in disbelief. “Sawyer LeGrande,” I repeat, like maybe there’s possibly some other Sawyer she thinks I’m talking about. “Hanging out by the Slurpees.”

  Soledad takes a moment to process that information, then: “What flavor?”

  I blink at her. “What flavor?”

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  “What the hell kind of question is that?”

  “Watch it,” she reminds me, and I look guiltily at Hannah. Already my kid is toddling and full of jabber, gobbling the universe with a terrific kind of greed, and I know it’s only a matter of time before she gets to preschool and starts asking her teacher why today’s snack is so shitty.

  “Sorry,” I mutter, planting a kiss against her warm, downy head as she smashes a little bit of tomato into my face. “Your mom is a trash mouth.”

  “Did you skip your class?” Soledad asks, and I’m about to tell her exactly where community college falls on my list of priorities in this particular moment when my brother lets himself in through the back door, my father close behind him. There was a managers’ meeting at the restaurant this afternoon, I remember all of a sudden.

  “Ladies.” Cade glances at me briefly, heads directly for the fridge. He was a fullback on our high school’s football team, once upon a time, and he still eats like he’s bulking up for a game. “Saw Aaron at the gym this morning.”

  I ignore him—and the reference to my boyfriend—as if I haven’t even heard. “Did you know Sawyer is home?” I ask instead. I don’t mean to sound as crazy as I do, so close to hysterical; I take a deep breath, bounce Hannah on my hip, and try to contain the overflow. “Did you?”

  “No,” Cade says immediately, but suddenly he won’t look at me and the back of my neck is prickling. He frowns at the contents of the refrigerator, like there’s something really interesting going on in there. “Did you drink all the OJ?” he asks.

  “Kincade, I am going to ask you again—”

  “What?” He sounds pissed at me now, irritated. “I didn’t know, exactly—”

  “Cade!”

  “Reena.” My father steps between us like we’re seven and twelve instead of eighteen and twenty-three, like maybe I’m about to pull some bratty little-sister move involving a shin-kick or a punch to the back of the head. Like maybe I’m not standing here holding a child of my own. “Enough,” he says, and I turn on him. My father and Sawyer’s have been friends since they were children; they’ve owned the restaurant for more than a decade, are godfathers to each other’s sons. There is no way in the breathing world that if Sawyer LeGrande so much as crossed the state line into Florida, my father didn’t hear about it.

  “What about you?” I demand, trying to keep my voice steady. His hair is going gray at the temples. Hannah squirms unhappily in my arms. “You must have known.”

  My father nods. “Yes,” he says, and looks at me evenly. One thing he never does is lie.

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  He doesn’t reply for a minute, like he’s thinking. Dark spots from the rainstorm are flecked across his shirt. “No,” he says, when he’s ready. “I didn’t.”

  None of this is new information, but still it hits like something with physical force, a pillowcase full of nickels or God sending a flood for forty days. “Why not?” I ask, and it comes out a lot sadder than I mean it to.

  “Reena—”

  “Soledad, please.”

  “I didn’t tell you he was here,” my father says slowly, and he is the very theology of calm, “because I was hoping he wasn’t going to stay.”

  Well.

  All three of them are looking at me, waiting. Soledad’s got a hand pressed to her heart. Cade is still standing at the refrigerator, all bulk and muscle, watchful.

  “OJ’s in the door,” I tell him finally, and take Hannah upstairs for her nap.

  4

  Before

  “We’re getting too old for this,” Allie declared suddenly. We were wasting the morning on the swing set at the far corner of her parents’ huge, immaculate backyard: just the two of us, just like usual, her corn-yellow hair brushing the grass as she leaned back as far as she could.

  “We are too old for it,” I said. I was lying upside down on the plastic slide, knees bent, hands groping without luck for a dandelion or some crabgrass to pick at. Allie’s dad was fanatical about the lawn. We were fifteen that summer, not quite driving, perpetually bumming rides off a couple of Allie’s older friends. “That’s the point. Shut up and swing.”

  “Fine,” she said, laughing. “Maybe I will.” Then, on second thought, righting herself with a dizzy shake of her head: “Want to go get coffee?”

  I frowned. In a minute it was going to be too hot to keep lying like this, but the reason Allie wanted to go get coffee was because her friend Lauren Werner worked at Bump and Grind and gave out free iced mochas, and I hated Lauren Werner’s guts. “Do you want coffee?”

  Allie considered that one for a moment, eyes narrowing behind her enormous tortoiseshell sunglasses. “No,” she said eventually, heaving a put-upon sigh. “I just want to go someplace.”

  I was about to suggest an early movie, or maybe coffee at the bookstore instead, but just then her mom appeared at the sliding door to the kitchen, her hair the same perfect blond as Allie’s but bobbed short and sensible. “Girls?” she called, leaning against the doorjamb, one bare foot coming up to scratch her opposite knee. “I made muffins, if you’re hungry!”

  “Don’t fall for it,” Allie said immediately. “They’re full of flax.”

  “Don’t tell her that!” her mom yelled back. Mrs. Ballard had ears like a bat. “They are not. Just try one, Reena.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, after a moment. I was agreeable in general, and anyway I had to pee. I flipped myself backward off the slide and wandered toward the house across the deep, lucid green of the grass, the heat like a wall of syrup even this early in the day. “I’m coming.”

  “Get cards, too!” Allie called, any and all plans for leaving the yard suddenly forgotten. We were playing only old-person card games that summer: bridge and pinochle, euchre and hearts. It was this thing Allie had us doing, the latest in a long sequence of summers with themes like French Braid Pigtails and The Katharine Hepburn M
ovie Canon. “And paper and pen!”

  “Anything else”—I shot her a look over my shoulder—“Your Majesty?”

  Allie grinned her biggest and goofiest, flinging one rubber flip-flop off her foot in my general direction. “Pleeease?”

  “We’ll see.”

  I peed and got the cards from her bedroom and opened the makeup case on her dresser, digging around for the Risky Business lip gloss I knew she’d gotten at the mall earlier that week. I pulled out some eye shadow and a couple of tampons but didn’t see it, and was about to give up when my fingers curled around a tarnished, silver half-moon on a thin rope that I recognized—immediately, without even thinking about it, the way you recognize your own face in the mirror—as Sawyer LeGrande’s.

  I blinked. I swallowed. I stood there for I don’t know how long, central air humming quietly in the background and my bare feet sinking into the pale gray wall-to-wall carpet, fresh with vacuum marks from the Ballards’ cleaning lady, Valencia. Finally I went outside—right past Mrs. Ballard, who was holding a paper plate with two flaxseed blueberry muffins, the thought of which, suddenly, made me feel a little sick.

  Allie looked up as I approached. She was hanging from the rings at this point, flipping herself over and over like we’d done when we were small, tan legs kicking. “Where’s the poison muffins?” she asked. Then, seeing my face: “What?”

  I held the necklace out in front of me like it was radioactive, pendant swinging. “Did you steal this?” I demanded, and even to my own ears I sounded shrill.

  Allie let go of the jungle gym. Her whole expression changed in a way I’d never seen before, almost accusatory, a security grate going down. “Were you going through my stuff?” she asked.

  “Was I what?” I was startled. We went through each other’s stuff all the time, Allie and me, no problem. She could have recited the contents of my desk drawers off the top of her head. “I was looking for the Risky Business.” Allie blinked. “Oh,” she said, and just like that she looked normal again. She dug the tube out of the back pocket of her shorts. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” I put it on, still staring. The silver moon bounced off my knuckles, and when I handed her the lip gloss back, she took that, too, out of sight like a sleight of hand. “So?” I prodded. “Did you steal it?”

  “Did I steal it?” she repeated. “What do you think? I’m some kind of freaky klepto?”

  “Oh, like you’ve never stolen anything before.”

  Allie cocked her head to the side like, fair point. “I stole that lip gloss, actually,” she admitted.

  “What?” I said. “At the mall? I thought you paid for it.”

  “I just told you I did.” She shrugged. “It was when you were smelling the perfumes.”

  Oh, for God’s sake. I sat down hard right in the middle of the lawn, flopping backward and looking at the clear, unforgiving sky. The air felt like a wet blanket. “You gotta knock that off.”

  “I know,” she said, and lay down beside me. Neither of us said anything for a minute. I could hear her stomach growling and the faint sound of wasps nearby.

  “Al,” I said eventually, trying to keep my voice even, not wanting to sound as slightly hysterical as I felt. She’d been my best friend since we were four. “Where did you get that necklace?”

  Allie sighed like a white flag waving, like I was just going to torture the truth out of her anyway and it was easier to tell me the truth. “I didn’t steal it,” she said.

  I felt all the breath whoosh out of me, dizzy even though I was already lying down. “I didn’t think so,” I told her, and as it came out of my mouth I realized it was true. “He gave it to you?”

  Allie nodded. She rolled over onto her side, propped herself up on one sharp elbow to look me in the face. “I was going to tell you,” she said finally. “I didn’t know how.”

  I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes, colors exploding like fireworks, like something detonating inside my head. “Sawyer LeGrande gave you that necklace,” I repeated, and I almost cracked up laughing, that’s how ridiculous it sounded out loud. “Since when are you hanging out with Sawyer LeGrande?”

  There was that edge in my voice again, that crazy shrillness, but Allie just shrugged. “Few weeks?”

  “A few weeks?”

  “Three?”

  “Three?” I sat up fast, and now I really was dizzy. In the yard it was very, very hot. “And we’re only just talking about it now?”

  “Oh, come on, Reena,” she said, getting up herself, red-cheeked and with a hint of a challenge in her voice. “Like you’re the easiest person in the world to tell stuff to. Especially this.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “That’s not true, and it’s not fair to—”

  “I’m sorry,” she said immediately, recalibrating. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I should have mentioned it to you.”

  “Should have mentioned it to me?”

  “Okay, can you stop repeating everything I say?”

  “I’m not re—” I caught myself just in time. “Al, this isn’t some random person, this is Sawyer Le—”

  “What do you want to know?”

  What did I want to know? I stared at her, openmouthed and stupid. I had no idea what questions to ask. I felt, absurdly and with some panic, that I might be about to burst into tears.

  “Come on,” she said softly, and after a moment nudged at me with her knee. She hated having people mad at her, Allie; had almost no tolerance for it at all. “Don’t look at me like that. Not you.”

  “I’m not looking at you like anything,” I told her. “I’m just … looking at you.”

  “Your face is doing a funny thing.”

  “It is not!” I laughed, a weird little bark that didn’t sound anything like my normal laugh, even to me. “This is just what I look like.”

  “It is not what you look like,” she corrected. “Stop. We’re just hanging out. He’s friends with Lauren. I saw him one day at Bump and Grind and he asked if I wanted to, you know—”

  “If you wanted to what, exactly?”

  “If I wanted to hang out! It’s not a big deal.” Suddenly Allie looked at me a little more closely, like a thought was just occurring to her. The tips of her ears were red from the sun. “You’re not, like, really upset, are you?” she asked me. “I mean, I know we always joke about how hot he is and stuff, but you don’t actually, like … I mean, if you really care—”

  “I don’t,” I protested immediately, like if I could deliver the lie with enough emphasis, it would somehow make it even a little bit true. In the back of my head I knew Allie was right: I was famous for keeping my emotions to myself. If she didn’t realize how much—how hugely—I felt whatever it was I felt for Sawyer, then chances are it was my fault for never letting on.

  It was too late to tell her now, though, sitting there in the yard like I had on a hundred other summer mornings—not if Sawyer had already chosen her. Not if they’d already chosen each other. The only thing to do now was to protect myself with the lie.

  “It’s fine,” I continued, shrugging nonchalantly. “You guys should do whatever makes you happy.” I probably would have kept going—offered to help them pick out a china pattern for their wedding, maybe—but thank God there was Mrs. Ballard back at the screen door, voice like a Klaxon across the empty yard.

  “Girls!” She sounded annoyed this time, impatient. I wondered how much she’d heard. “Do you want these or not?”

  “We don’t want ’em, Ma!” Allie yelled, and then turned back to me expectantly. But I was already getting to my feet, brushing my shorts off, and arranging my face into a mask of easy, artificial calm.

  “I want them,” I said, even though I didn’t really. I crossed the grass, the sun beating down on my dark curtain of hair. “I’m coming,” I called, leaving Allie behind.

  5

  After

  I wander downstairs once Hannah is in bed for the night, thinking I might do some school reading at the pi
cnic table in the yard. It’s humid and swampy out, the air thick with mosquitoes, but frankly it’s not worse than any other night and I feel too big for these walls anyway.

  I spend a lot of time out here in the evenings, tethered to the house with one ear out for the baby, feet up on a lounge chair and the odd lizard scurrying up the trunk of the orange tree. The damp air curls the pages of my books. I’ll do schoolwork or click around on Facebook, talk with Soledad if she’s feeling chatty. I used to try to write out here sometimes, before I finally gave up and stopped tormenting myself—the blank screen like a sweeping accusation from the person I used to be back in high school, everything I said I was going to do and didn’t.

  Tonight my father’s beaten me out here, though, already hard at work in the garden he’s kept since Cade and I were babies, pulling the aphids off his tomato plants. He’s listening to Sarah Vaughan through the kitchen window. Soil is caked into the creases of his palms.

  I almost turn around, just cut my losses and go—I’m still angry with him from earlier, absolutely, but that’s not the whole story, not by a long shot. I knew from the second I saw him that Sawyer turning up here was going to unearth all kinds of nastiness for my father, and just standing near him I’m hit with that familiar sear of frustration and shame. For a second I’m sixteen again, pregnant and hopeless, every careful plan for my future scattered like hayseed in a dry wind.

  Still: That was before.

  “How’s it going?” I venture, crossing the patio to be near him. The slate is warm under my feet.

  My father glances up at me, then back at his tall, spindly plants. His doctor says gardening’s good for his heart, although that’s not why he does it. “All right, I suppose.” He sighs, rubs at a prickly green leaf with the pad of his thumb. “Worried about rot.” I watch as he moves on to the zucchini, the bright yellow summer squash. He’ll finish with Soledad’s rosebushes, just like always, pruning them back before they climb clear up the side of the house and take over like something out of a fairy tale.