How to Love

Katie Cotugno How to Love

For Jackie, who read everything first

1

After

I’ve been looking for Sawyer for half a lifetime when I find him standing in front of the Slurpee machine at the 7-Eleven on Federal Highway, gazing through the window at the frozen, neon-bright churning like he’s expecting the mysteries of the universe to be revealed to him from inside.

Come to think of it, maybe he is.

I stop. I stare. I need gum and a soda and a box of animal crackers for Hannah, but already I know I’m going to be walking out of this place empty-handed. I’m due at my stupid accounting class in fifteen minutes. Water from the storm outside drips from my all-purpose braid and onto the dingy linoleum; a tiny puddle forms around my feet.

“Hey, Reena.” Just like that, just like always, I’m caught. He’s fitting a lid onto his plastic cup, careful, but nobody has ever sneaked up on Sawyer LeGrande in his entire life, and when he turns to face me it’s like he’s not even a little bit surprised. His hair is buzzed nearly clean off.

“Hey, Sawyer,” I say slowly, a sound like waves and roaring in my head. I slip my index finger through my key ring and squeeze, the cold metal biting into the flesh of my palm as it occurs to me how unfair it is that after all this time God knows where, he shows up tan and luminescent to find me looking like half-drowned trailer trash. I have no makeup on. My jeans have big holes in both knees. I’m at least ten pounds fatter than I was the last time we saw each other, but before I have time to be properly humiliated he’s bypassed the corn chips and beef jerky and is hugging me tight. Like it’s something we do a lot.

He smells the same, is the first thing I notice, like bar soap and things that grow in the ground. I blink. “I didn’t know,” I begin, not entirely sure which particular ignorance I’m about to confess: all of them, maybe, eighteen years’ worth of universal truths everybody was smart enough to figure out except for me.

“I just got back yesterday,” he says. “I haven’t been to the restaurant yet.” He grins one of those slow smiles of his, crooked, the kind I’ve been trying to write out of my system since seventh grade. “I think maybe I’m surprising a lot of people.”

“You think?” I snap, before I can stop it.

Sawyer stops smiling. “I … yeah,” he says. “I think.”

“Right.” I can’t come up with anything better than that. I can’t can’t come up with anything at all, which is how it always was with Sawyer, though you’d like to imagine I’d have outgrown at least some of it by now. Back when we used to work the same shifts at Antonia’s I’d be forever dropping plates and forgetting which orders went where, mixing up checks. One night when I was fifteen and he was behind the bar, a woman at one of my tables ordered a Sex on the Beach and it took me so long to work up enough guts to say the words to him that she complained to my father about the slow service and I had to clean the kitchen after we closed.

“My mom told me …” he says now—trailing off, trying again. “About …”

I imagine letting him dangle there indefinitely, a hanged man, but in the end I’m the one who breaks first. “Hannah,” I supply, wondering what else his mother told him. I can’t stop staring at his face. “Her name is Hannah.”

“Yeah. I mean.” Sawyer looks uncomfortable, like he’s waiting for something else to happen. For me to just come out and say it, maybe—Welcome back, how was your trip, we made a baby—but I keep my jaw clamped firmly shut. Let him wonder for once, I think meanly. Let him sweat it out for a change. The Slurpee’s bright green, like a space alien. My braid’s left a wet spot on my shirt. Sawyer shifts his weight awkwardly. “She said.”

We stand there. We breathe. I can hear the hum and clatter of the market all around us, everything chilly and refrigerator-bright. There’s a huge, garish poster of pretzel dogs over his left shoulder. I have pictured this going differently.

“Well,” I say after a minute, aiming for casual and missing by roughly the distance between here and the other side of the world. “It’s good to run into you. I should probably get what I came for, or like—” I stop, peel a stray hair off my forehead, glance up at the buzzing fluorescent lights. “Sawyer, I really gotta go.”

His jaw twitches, infinitesimal, the kind of thing you’d never notice if you hadn’t spent your entire adolescence doing things like looking at his jaw. “Reena …”

“Oh, buddy, please don’t.” I don’t want to make it easy on him. I shouldn’t have to. Not when he’s the one who disappeared, took off without even saying Good-bye, see you later, I love you. Not when he’s the one who just left. “Look, whatever you’re going to tell me, don’t worry about it. It all turned out fine, right?”

“No, it didn’t.” He gazes at me and I am remembering so clearly how he looked when he was eight, when he was eleven, when he was seventeen. Sawyer and I were only together for a few months before he left, but he was my golden boy for so long before that, he would have taken the guts of me with him even if we’d never been a couple at all.

I shrug and look around at the ice cream, at the displays of chewing tobacco and chips. I shake my head. “Sure it did.”

“Come on, Reena.” Sawyer rocks back on his heels like I’ve shoved him. “Don’t blow me off here.”

“Don’t blow you off?” It comes out a lot louder than I mean it to, and I hate myself for letting him know that I still think about him, that I carry him around inside my skin. “Everybody thought you were dead in an alley someplace, Sawyer. I thought you were dead in an alley someplace. So maybe I’m not the best person to talk to about feeling like you’re getting blown off.”

It sounds nasty and composed, and for one second my mighty magician Sawyer looks so helpless, so completely sorry, that it almost breaks my heart all over again. “Don’t do that,” I order quietly. “It’s not fair.”

“I’m not,” he says, shaking his head, recovering. “I’m not.”

I roll my eyes. “Sawyer, just—”

“You look really good, Reena.”

Just like that he’s back to taming lions; this whole thing is so surreal I almost smile. “Shut up,” I tell him, trying to mean it.

“What? You do.” As if he’s got some sixth sense for nearly breaking me, Sawyer grins. “Am I going to see you around?”

“Are you going to be around?”

“Yeah.” Sawyer nods. “I think so.”

“Well.” I shrug like somebody whose hands aren’t shaking, whose throat hasn’t closed like a fist. I only just finally got used to him being gone. “I live here.”

“I want to meet that baby of yours.”

“I mean, she lives here, too.” I’m aware that there are other people in this aisle, normal convenience-store shoppers whose worlds haven’t taken a sharp and unexpected curve this fine morning. One of them nudges me out of the way to get to the Cheetos. Outside it’s still pouring like crazy, like maybe the end of the world is at hand. I breathe out as steadily as I can manage. “Bye, Sawyer.”

“See you, Reena,” he tells me, and if I didn’t know better I’d think it was a promise.

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