How to Love

the sun. Sawyer is patient; he stands there and he lets me look.

“What?” I snap, when I’m finished.

His lips twitch. “Nothing,” he says.

I pick up my purse and dig through it for my car keys, pushing The Very Hungry Caterpillar out of the way for the second time today. “Have you been here all afternoon?” I ask, eyes on the jumbled contents of my bag so I don’t have to look at him.

“No.” As soon as he says it I look up at him anyway. Sawyer shakes his head. “I looked at the schedule.”

“Why?”

“To catch you when you were leaving.”

“Well,” I say as nastily as I can manage, finally putting my hands on my keys, “mission accomplished. Here I go.”

Sawyer doesn’t move from the doorway. “Looked pretty busy today,” he says. “Have to get used to it again, I guess.”

My eyes narrow. “Why’s that?” I demand. We have another bartender now, a fiftyish guy named Joe who’s always sending me home with lollipops for Hannah, even though she’s too young to eat them. “You’re not picking up shifts, are you?”

“Are you going to kill me if I say yes?”

“Possibly,” I tell him, and he smiles like I’m trying to be funny. I’m not trying to be funny. I think I might burst into tears. “Can you stop?” I ask, voice brittle. For a while Hannah was doing this thing when she got upset where she clamped her hands over her ears and screamed. “I mean it. I’m not—just— stop.”

Sawyer quits smiling, makes a move to come toward me. I hold out my hands to keep him away.

“Reena,” he starts.

“Seriously,” I tell him. “You can’t just come here after all this time and try to joke around with me and act like nothing happened. That’s not—Stuff happened, Sawyer. You can’t just be back.”

Sawyer shrugs once, just barely. He looks so much older than he did. “I am back, though,” he tells me softly. “You gotta … I am.”

The hideous thing is this: I want to forgive him. Even after everything, I do. A baby before my seventeenth birthday and a future as lonely as the surface of the moon and still just the sight of him feels like a homecoming, like a song I used to know but somehow forgot.

And God in his golden heaven, how completely messed up is that?

“Stay away from me,” I mutter, and shove past him out of the room.

* * *

“How was work?” Soledad wants to know when I get back to the house a while later. She’s sitting cross- legged on the sofa, wearing her reading glasses and working intently on the crossword in the paper. Soledad learned English when she was twenty-two and still she does the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen, and that’s only one of the reasons why I love her.

“Sucked, thanks. Hey, pretty lady,” I say, scooping Hannah up from where she’s playing on the floor and planting noisy raspberries on her tummy until she’s giggling like gangbusters, squirming happily in my arms. “How was your day, huh? You have fun today?”

“She was a dream,” Soledad reports, same thing she says every time she watches Hannah. They spend a lot of time together, and I like the idea of her as a second mom to Hannah, just like she was to me. Soledad lived with our family for nearly a decade before my father asked her to marry him, another piece of this family clicking quietly into place. It is not good for man to be alone.

“Where is he?” I ask her now, toeing off my sneakers and hefting Hannah onto my hip. My dad has been avoiding me since our run-in at the tomato plants, studiously absent whenever I’m around. The baby chatters happily into my ear.

“In the yard again. Reena …” Soledad looks sorry. Sometimes her voice reminds me of water over a fire, the steam rushing up like that. “You might want to give him some time.”

“Oh.” I nod. I’m not entirely sure what she’s worried about, his temper or his heart. Both, most likely: When I used the computer this morning I saw her recent Google search for the effects of stress on cardiac conditions. “Okay. You know, I was thinking of taking the baby for a ride.”

“We’re supposed to meet Roger and Lyd in a little bit anyway,” Soledad tells me. “Gonna check out that new place on Las Olas.” She looks like she wants to say something else, and for a moment I almost ask her how it’s possible that my father can eat a friendly dinner with Sawyer’s parents, size up the culinary competition, but can’t find it in his heart to look at me. In the end, though, both of us let it lie. “Have a good time,” is all she says.

“We will. Come on, you,” I tell the baby, and bring her upstairs for a change before we go. “We’re road trippin’.”

* * *

Hannah had wicked colic when she was an infant; she didn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time until she was nearly six months old. Changing her feeding schedule didn’t work. Laying her down on the dryer didn’t work. Backrubs didn’t work, and neither did long soaks in the baby tub. Soledad helped as much as she could, but in the end it was Hannah and me sitting on the floor and crying, two men trapped in a mine. I honestly had no idea what to do.

She did like driving, though, and if I wasn’t too exhausted to get behind the wheel of a car, it usually wasn’t too long before she’d pass out in the backseat—head lolled back, tiny fist shoved in her mouth. Still, for the first hour or so the slightest stop would wake her, so I took to driving for miles on the interstate, where there was no threat of red lights or pedestrians to slow us down. Once, I ran out of gas in Miami and had to call Cade to come get us. Another night I made it all the way to Vero before I realized it was probably time to head home.

Eventually, Hannah’s bellyaches subsided and our moonlight excursions up and down 95 became less and less frequent. I haven’t driven this stretch of highway in months. But tonight, as the baby drifts off to dreamland to the dependable droning of public-radio jazz, the scene out the windows is as familiar as home.

12

Before

Sawyer didn’t say a word as he sped away from the ice cream shop and toward the hospital, went quiet as nighttime and just as still. A gorge had opened up inside my chest. The CD in the stereo was still spinning, old Louis Armstrong Sawyer must have gotten from my dad, and I reached forward and clicked it off. “It’s bad, right?” I asked.

Sawyer shrugged once, eyes on the asphalt in front of him. “I don’t know.”

“It must be bad, right? If she’s already in surgery and my dad wouldn’t—” I broke off, the words swallowed up by guilt and confusion and this huge, endless fear. I dug my fingernails into the passenger seat, willing the car to go faster. “It must be bad.”

“I said I don’t know, Reena,” he told me, and I was quiet after that.

We parked in the cavernous garage at the hospital and got lost on the way to the ER, the two of us wandering the corridors like some panicky, overgrown Hansel and Gretel. “This way,” Sawyer said finally, and I followed him dumbly down a freezing, fluorescent hallway, then through a set of doors and into chaos.

There was a crowd in the waiting room, small but restless: Allie’s parents and Sawyer’s, Lydia with her wild hair secured in a complicated knot. Lauren Werner was there, crying noisily. And there were my father and Soledad, watchful and waiting, somehow already gutted like carcasses or husks. Soledad looked heartbroken. My father looked old.

They got to their feet as I ran across the wide expanse of linoleum, and I saw my father’s eyes narrow in confusion: On the phone we had never actually established where I was or who I was with, and now here was Sawyer close behind me, throwing off fear and heat.