How to Love

Allie’s boyfriend, I thought, for the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes. I was with Allie’s boyfriend.

He didn’t have time to ask, though, because Allie’s mom had spotted me and was rushing forward, grabbing me so tightly it was painful. I felt my ribs scrape together inside my chest. “She’s dead,” Mrs. Ballard wailed. It was a sound I’d never heard before and, if it pleases God, a sound I would like never to hear again. “Reena, baby. Our girl is gone.”

I thought, very clearly: This isn’t happening.

I thought, very clearly: This is our fault.

I stood there with Allie’s mom for a while, let her sob into the limp fabric of my shirt. I didn’t cry. I didn’t do much of anything, to be honest; I felt frozen, bizarrely quiet, like something had been hermetically sealed inside me. I heard the whine of an ambulance in the distance, the whoosh of a door whispering shut. Finally Mr. Ballard pried her gently out of my arms.

“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.

13

After

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.