How to Love Read online

  “Look, Reena.” As soon as it was out there Allie knew she’d crossed some boundary, some line of demarcation so clearly marked that once she’d breached it our lives would always be divided into when we were little kids and when we weren’t, neatly bisected into the then and the now. I looked at her for one more moment, and then I turned around. Thunder rumbled over my head, loud and ominous, a storm about to break.

  “Reena,” Allie called behind me, more forcefully this time, but by then I was already gone.

  7

  After

  One thing about living in South Florida is that everywhere you go is violently air-conditioned, the tabernacle included. It’s sixty-five degrees inside Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal when we walk into church on Sunday, has been since God invented HVAC. Forever and ever, amen.

  We’re church families, the LeGrandes and us: christenings and confirmations, spaghetti dinners and Sunday school. My father and Soledad were married in this building. In middle school I used to stop in to light candles for my mom. Even at my most miserable and lonely and pregnant I sat right behind Sawyer’s parents every weekend in the seventh pew on the right, and though I think that at this point his family and mine love and hate each other with equal intensity, the Profession of Faith is just one more thing we’ve always done together, world without end.

  Today I’ve barely gotten Hannah’s sausage-link arms into the sweater Soledad finished just this week when Sawyer sidles in flanked by Roger and Lydia, his hands shoved deep into his dark jeans and sunglasses hanging from the V of his button-down. Everyone, even Sawyer, wears a collared shirt to church.

  “Hey, everybody,” he whispers, as they slide into the row in front of us. My father ignores him. My brother only glares. His wife, Stefanie, is gaping a little in a way that makes me want to smack her across her round, curious face: Yes, Stef, he’s good-looking. Yes, Stef, he’s back.

  Jesus Christ, everybody. Pull it together.

  Soledad is apparently the only member of my family with a modicum of grace, not that this comes as any kind of revelation. “Hi, Sawyer,” she says to him, voice tempered as always by traces of a childhood spent in Cuba. Beside him, his mother is glowing, radiating light, and why shouldn’t she be? Just like the story promised, her prodigal returned. “It’s good to see you.”

  He kisses Soledad’s cheek before he turns to look at Hannah, and for nearly a full minute they stare at each other, silent. There is a moment when I do not breathe. Sawyer has always been full of nervous habits, perpetually tapping his fingers or rubbing hard at a muscle at his neck—it’s part of what makes girls fall in love with him—but now he goes still as winter, like the blood has dried up in his veins.

  Lydia clears her throat. Hannah fidgets. Sawyer looks at me like I’ve broken his beating heart.

  “Nice work,” is all he says, and I laugh.

  Back when we were together I used to spend my Sunday mornings in church poking Sawyer in the back, waiting until no one was looking and quietly snapping the elastic on the boxers peeking out the rear of his pants. He’d reach behind and grab my hand, the two of us thumb wrestling until Soledad or Lydia noticed and elbowed one or both of us in the side. “Pay attention,” they’d hiss, and then turn back to the priest and pretty much leave us to our own devices.

  We were sweethearts. It’s a thing that happened. It’s over now. It’s fine.

  Halfway through the psalm and Hannah’s wriggles turn to whimpers; her body is thermal and heavy in my arms. She’s crabby, is all. She didn’t sleep well last night—neither of us slept very well last night, if you want to know the truth—but in this second it feels like she’s on to me, all terrifying toddler intuition. In this second it feels like she knows.

  I scoop her up and head for the aisle, because in another second we’re both going to lose it, right in the middle of a reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: Behold, I tell you a mystery. We burst through the doors at the back, straight into a blinding shock of light.

  “I never liked Paul much anyway,” I tell Hannah once we’re hidden away in the courtyard outside the church, a flagstone patio peopled by half a dozen life-size statues of angels and saints, like some kind of weird religious cocktail party hosted by the apostle Bartholomew. I set Hannah on her feet and let her walk. Summer in Broward County is brutal and haunted, all palm trees and the green tangle of sea grapes wound around the grotto on the lawn. Hannah grabs at a cluster of Spanish moss with her pudgy starfish hands. “Oh, boy,” I say. “Whatcha got over there, chick?”

  “Oh, boy,” she repeats, and I grin. Hannah’s a hugely beautiful kid, dark-haired and sloe-eyed, even taking into account the fact that I grew her inside my body and therefore might possibly be a little prejudiced. Strangers stop and say she’s beautiful all the time. “Oh, boy!”

  I sit down on a wooden bench to watch her. A taciturn Virgin Mary holds court on top of a dried-up fountain at the edge of the patio, a missing chunk of plaster where her veil should meet her dress. I think of my own mom, whom I hardly remember—just a waterfall of dark hair and the faint smell of lavender—and wonder if she’d have any secrets to share. I run my thumb over the jagged edge of stone, waiting. Soledad prays to Mary for virtually everything and swears that Mary answers every time, but if either this mother or mine have any advice to dispense, at the moment they are holding their tongues.

  “Fat lot of help you are,” I tell them, and jump up to catch my kid before she falls.

  8

  Before

  I had no friends in tenth grade.

  Okay, that’s dramatic. I had friends. I didn’t eat lunch alone on a toilet seat or anything. Mostly, I just didn’t eat lunch. I went to the library. I hung out on the bleachers and read. When I did go to the cafeteria, I sat with Shelby, the new hostess at the restaurant. Shelby was a junior; she’d just moved from Tucson with her mom and her twin brother, Aaron, although he’d only needed about two days in the pestilent swamp of South Florida to decide there was absolutely no way he could ever live here. He’d fled to New Hampshire to live with their dad before school had even started. Shelby had hair like a flaming neon carrot and a mouth like a merchant marine; she wore tiny silver hoops all up the side of her left ear and was dating the captain of the girls’ soccer team. I’d automatically assumed she thought I was too boring to breathe air until the day she plopped her tray right next to mine and demanded to know what was up with the food in this godforsaken place like maybe we’d been friends all our lives.

  “It sucks,” I told her, blinking in grateful surprise. “That’s … basically what’s up.”

  Shelby grinned, handed me half the Kit Kat she was unwrapping. “Looks that way.”

  She was giving me a ride to work one afternoon, nineties girl rock blaring from the speakers in her decrepit Volvo wagon as she pulled out of the parking lot, when she snorted and gestured out the windshield with her chin. “Is that the bartender?” she asked, squinting a little. “From the restaurant?”

  I followed her gaze to the side of the building, half hidden by a row of dry, browning shrubs: In the shadow cast by the overhang above the side door of the gym, Allie and Sawyer were pressed against the concrete, his palm sliding steadily up her skirt.

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. For a second it felt hard to breathe, like there was something unfamiliar taking up space in my chest beside my heart and lungs. “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “People gettin’ at it in broad daylight,” Shelby said brightly, pulling out into traffic. “That’s how you know the terrorists haven’t won.” Then she looked at me, her pale eyebrows knitting together. “What?” she asked. “Shit, sorry. Are you one of those people who’s really sensitive about terrorist jokes?”

  That made me laugh. “I’m not particularly sensitive about anything,” I lied, glancing out the window for another half a second before tilting my head up to stare at the fat, heavy clouds.

  *

  The year ground on in that way—Halloween, Thanksg
iving. I finally got my learner’s permit. I spent a whole lot of time with my journal. Soledad watched me carefully, cataloging the narrowing parameters of my teenage life like an anthropologist conducting a field study: school, work, home. Rinse, repeat. I didn’t tell her about Allie and Sawyer—never told her about Allie and me—but that didn’t stop her from knowing. “Do you want to talk about this?” she asked me once, Saturday night and three episodes into a Bridezillas marathon on cable.

  I shrugged like I didn’t have the slightest idea what she meant. “Talk about what?” I wondered blandly.

  Soledad rolled her eyes.

  *

  I called Allie once, for the record. She didn’t pick up, and I didn’t leave a message.

  Also for the record: She didn’t call me back.

  The answer, I always thought, was to get out of town. I’d always liked to read about foreign places—I’d been getting National Geographic since I was ten—but that winter I was absolutely insatiable, camped out on my bed surrounded by travel books from the library, their cellophane jackets sticky with dust. I plotted. I made lists. I stayed up all night clicking through blog after blog, stories and pictures of women who spent years in Morocco and Tanzania and the South of France—then mapped my own itinerary, tracing my route with a silver Sharpie like some kind of imaginary Silk Road.

  I wanted so, so badly to leave.

  “Where you going tonight?” my father asked me one evening, hovering in the doorway of my bedroom, tonic and lime in his hand. He’d been playing the piano downstairs, and somewhere in my head I’d dimly registered the quiet, the way you notice the dishwasher kicking off.

  “Chicago,” I told him cheerfully, looking up from the pictures of Oak Park on my laptop. He’d had a heart attack a couple of years before, my father, collapsing in the parking lot outside my eighth-grade graduation; I tried to be cheerful with him whenever I could. “Or possibly Copenhagen.”

  “Chicago’s a pretty good music town,” he told me, nodding like he was thinking about it, like it was a place I might actually be headed. “You might want to lay over in the kitchen first, though. Soledad’s making pesto.”

  I smiled and closed my computer, rolled myself off the bed. “Be right there.”

  *

  One morning that spring I got a note in homeroom saying I needed to go to Guidance by the end of the day, which left me feeling startled and uneasy. I’d never been called to the office before. I wondered if I was in trouble for something I didn’t know I’d done, or if some well-meaning Samaritan had expressed concern about my ability to cope with the tyranny of high school in general. “We’ve noticed you’re socially inept,” I pictured the counselor saying, her jowly face tilted to the side to show how well she was listening. “You stare out the window constantly. You’re obsessive, and you spend too much time in your own brain.”

  “No kidding,” I imagined replying, hitching my backpack up on one shoulder and heading down the hall toward English. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  I spent all morning with a hard little knot of anxiety lodged someplace in my middle, then knocked tentatively on the door of the office at the beginning of my lunch period. The air smelled like coffee and dust. I was expecting to meet with Mrs. Ortum, the older, slightly daffy-looking counselor who’d run all our ninth-grade seminars and whose husband, apparently, had made a hundred million dollars in tech stocks, but in her place was a dark-haired young woman I’d never seen before, a little plaque printed with MS. BOWEN on the desk.

  “Hi, Serena,” she said, smiling warmly. “Come on in.” I had no idea how she knew who I was, but she was pretty and smart-looking in a way that immediately made me want to please her. I found myself smiling back.

  “You’re not in trouble,” she said, as soon as I was seated. The sleeves of her starchy white button-down were rolled halfway up her arms. “Everybody I’ve had in here so far keeps thinking they’re in trouble.” She picked up a file folder, tapped it against her desk for a moment. Reading upside down, I could see that it contained my transcripts. “I’m new here, so I’m just kind of going through my lists and trying to get to know everyone I can.”

  She asked me how my classes were going and if I had an after-school job, taking notes on a yellow legal pad as I answered as vaguely as possible. A bright turquoise costume ring glittered on the middle finger of her left hand. There was a carafe of water on the desk beside her, the fancy kind we used at the restaurant, with round slices of lemon floating inside. It seemed weirdly glamorous for school. Most of the faculty carried plastic travel mugs with bank logos on them.

  “Have you given much thought yet to college?” she asked finally, sitting back in her uncomfortable-looking chair and gazing at me shrewdly. She’d put the pen and paper back down on the desk.

  “A little,” I told her, which was a lie. In fact, I thought about college constantly, of where I might go and the people I might meet there. There was, at this very moment, a course catalog from Northwestern on my desk at home so well-thumbed it was basically falling apart, the writing program bookmarked with a neon yellow Post-it. I could have recited their arts and sciences requirements from memory. “But I’m only a sophomore, so I figured I had some time.”

  “Well,” Ms. Bowen said, “that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve been looking at your records, Serena, and they’re really impressive. A 4.0 GPA every semester you’ve been here, straight honors track since last year. I’d like to see you participating in an extracurricular or two, but the fact is that if you stay on this track, keep taking those APs and doing well on them, you could be eligible for graduation a full year early.” She leaned forward a bit, almost conspiratorial. She looked excited for me. “Is that something you might be interested in working toward?”

  It took me a minute to absorb that information. A full year early. Eligible for graduation. I stared at her for a moment, blinking; in the outer office I could hear the sounds of the copier jamming, an assistant’s frustrated dang.

  Ms. Bowen took my hesitation as reluctance; she cocked her glossy head to the side, the same sympathetic pose I’d imagined earlier. “Of course, you certainly don’t have to,” she amended. “I know plenty of students who wouldn’t want to miss out on being a senior, and everything that goes with it. I just wanted to let you know that you had the opt—”

  “I’d love to,” I interrupted quickly. I thought of airplanes and huge, drafty lecture halls, locks on cages springing free. “What do you need me to do?”

  *

  What Ms. Bowen needed me to do was pretty simple, at least for the time being: keep doing well in my classes, make a list of the schools I wanted to apply to, and get myself an SAT study book. “We’ll find you some volunteer work for the summer,” she promised, eyes shining like maybe she was just as excited about the prospect of pulling this off as I was. “Beef up your transcripts a bit.”

  *

  In May, two of the waitresses quit, so on top of the extra studying I worked like a demon, three nights a week and then doubles every weekend. I lived in black pants and a starchy white shirt. My father and Roger bought Antonia’s when I was a little girl and I’d been waiting tables just about that long, knew the menu and the regulars all by heart. The truth is, I’d always liked being there: the place all tin ceiling and subway tiles, white linen tablecloths like a hundred communion dresses. There was always a band set up by the bar.

  The guys playing tonight were some of my favorites, a quasi-ridiculous oldies ensemble who covered a lot of Sam Cooke, and I sang along under my breath while I zipped a couple of credit cards through the computer beside the bar. Sometime during the second verse I realized I wasn’t alone: Sawyer was leaning against the hatch and watching me, a wry, secret smile on his face.

  I snapped my jaw shut, blushing and surprised: Sawyer wasn’t even working tonight. He hadn’t been on the schedule. I hadn’t done anything nice to my hair. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, street clothes. He was giv
ing off the heat from outside. “Don’t tease,” I ordered, bouncing back after a minute, trying like hell not to let on that my feelings for him hadn’t let up even a little, though he’d been dating Allie for more than seven months. “It’s not nice.”

  Sawyer shrugged and just kept standing, like he had no place in the world to be other than here. “I’m not teasing,” he told me, and in truth, he didn’t actually seem to be. “‘Bring It On Home to Me’? That’s a good song.”

  “That’s a great song,” I corrected, and he grinned.

  “You sound like your dad.”

  “Nah. He likes Otis Redding.” I tore a receipt out of the printer, smiled back. “What are you doing here?”

  Sawyer tilted his head. “Looking for you.”

  “Right.” I snorted, slipping the cards back into the billfolds. “Your mom was floating around earlier.” Lydia wasn’t super involved in the day-to-day running of the restaurant, though her fingerprints were everywhere if you knew where to look: the formal antique portraits affixed to the doors of the restrooms, the Edison bulbs hanging above the bar. Lydia was an artist herself, a photographer, but her family had made a fortune with a chain of successful steak houses up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and she probably had a better head for the food business than either Roger or my dad. She’d turn up from time to time, watchful, an expression on her face like she was working out secret sums in her mind. The busboys were all terrified of her; Shelby called her Dragon Lady behind her back. I tried to stay out of her way.

  The one person Lydia never seemed to turn her cool, eagle-eyed artist’s scrutiny on was Sawyer. He was her only son, her Best Beloved: He’d had surgery when he was a baby to repair a literal hole in his heart, a fact Allie and I had always thought was enormously, unbearably romantic, and as long as I’d known Lydia she’d been ferociously protective of him. “She probably makes you have a blood test before you’re allowed to be his girlfriend,” Allie’d hypothesized at my house late one night, both of us dissolving into giggles—not that it seemed to have stopped her, in the end.