How to Love

Hannah whimpers for a moment like she’s going to start to fuss, and he dances around a little to stave off her cries. “Hey there, Hannah,” he says, once she relaxes. “Hey, pretty girl.”

Hannah smiles like the fog burning off in the morning. I glance sharply away. This close together they look so, so alike, olive skin and their sharp, intelligent faces. It makes my heart swoop sort of unpleasantly, a pinball machine on tilt. “Hi!” she says cheerfully.

Sawyer stares a moment. “She talks?” he asks, clearly surprised.

“I mean, she’s a human person,” I say snottily, then: “Sorry.” I give him some room, fingertips curling around the back of a kitchen chair. “That was—sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Sawyer shrugs, looks for a minute at the apple curve of Hannah’s cheek. “You get that I didn’t know, right?” he says quietly.

I flinch and clear my throat, glancing carefully away. “Know what?” I ask, all ignorance, as vanilla-bland as humanly possible.

“Please don’t.” Sawyer’s green eyes darken; there’s a set to his moody jaw. “Look,” he says. “You get to hate me. That’s … whatever. That’s okay. But don’t jerk me around about this, Reena. If she’s not mine—”

“Are you kidding me?” I gape at him, because seriously, the balls. “Of course she is!” In some kind of bizarre reflexive counter-illustration of my point, I snatch the baby out of his arms. Hannah startles. “Jesus Christ, Sawyer—”

“Well, then just say that!” Sawyer shakes his head. “Reena, I didn’t call anybody. Nobody knew how to find me. You know that. I didn’t know you were—if I’d have known, then—”

“Then what, exactly?” I snap. “You’d have stepped up? Or you’d have offered to pay for me to—”

“Don’t,” he interrupts, looking not at me but at the baby. “Come on. That sucks. That’s shitty.”

“Am I wrong?”

“Yes!” he explodes, and then hesitates, rubbing hard at the back of his neck. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” I tell him. I shove a container of Goldfish and some grapes into the baby bag, packing up one- handed. “That’s what I thought.”

Sawyer shakes his head again, frustrated, like I’m being deliberately obtuse. “I have no idea what I would have done, Reena. You know what I was like. I was screwed up. That’s why I left to begin with.” He sighs loudly, scrubs a hand over his bristly head. “But I’m here now.”

I hitch Hannah up on my hip. “Evidently.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Sawyer tells me, ignoring the acidic coat of sarcasm on my words. He moves deftly out of my way as I bounce around the kitchen, like he can anticipate where I’m going to go next. “I want to be here. I want to do whatever I can do to be a part of this.”

I open my mouth to say something snotty, then close it again. Suddenly I am so, so tired. I am tired like I’ve had two years of no sleep at all. “Okay,” I tell him. “Fine.”

Sawyer’s eyes widen, like he was expecting me to tell him to go screw off. I guess I can’t exactly blame him. “Okay?”

I shrug. “That’s what I said.”

We stand there for a minute, a cautious detente. I wait. The baby rests her heavy head on my shoulder like she’s bored of us, settling in.

“What about the park?” Sawyer asks, after a measure or two.

I blink at him. “The park?”

“Public place,” Sawyer explains, picking Hannah’s baby sunglasses up off the counter and handing them to me. “Middle of the day.”

I roll my eyes, but I take the glasses. “Oh, stop it,” I say.

“Made you smile.”

“Congratulations,” I tell him, snorting a bit. I perch the sunglasses on top of Hannah’s head, careful. She only likes to wear them about half the time.

Sawyer is grinning. “How’s tomorrow?”

I sigh. “Tomorrow is fine.”

“Reena, sweetheart—” Soledad pokes her head through the swinging door into the kitchen and stops cold when she sees us. Her dark eyebrows twitch.

“Ma’am,” Sawyer says. If he was wearing a hat he would tip it, I’m sure.

“Hi, Sawyer.” To me, pointedly: “Aaron is here.”

“Yup.” I heft the baby bag onto my shoulder, brush Hannah’s dark cap of baby hair out of her face. “I’ll be out in a sec.”

“So,” Sawyer says, once she’s gone, and of course now he’s going to push his luck. “Aaron.”

I roll my eyes. “I have a boyfriend, Sawyer, Jesus. I know that’s difficult to believe, but—”

“It’s not difficult.”

“Well.” I don’t know what to say to that, exactly. My heart is tapping away against my ribs. “Okay. I’ll see you.”

“Absolutely,” he says, but he follows me out of the kitchen like a shadow and I know he knows exactly what he’s doing. Aaron is standing in the living room, half watching the TV Soledad left on, shorts and flip-flops and an easy, unhurried grin.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” says Aaron.

“Hi,” says Sawyer.

We stand there, the three of us. We look at one another. Soledad’s got an expression on her face like she thinks I’ve lost my mind. “Aaron,” she says, when it’s clear I have no intention of making any kind of introduction. “This is Sawyer. Sawyer, Aaron.”

“Good to meet you,” says Aaron.

“Likewise,” says Sawyer.

“Well!” I say brightly. In a second I’m going to burst out laughing, but only to avoid some other, less desirable reaction. “We’ve gotta go.”

Sawyer nods slowly. He gazes at Aaron and then at me. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, the faintest hint of a smirk at the edges of his mouth.

Smug bastard. “Yup,” I say. “Bye.” I kiss Soledad and grab Aaron by the wrist, screen door smacking soundly shut behind us. I pretty much run to the car.

“So,” Aaron says, when we’re buckled. “That was him.”

I have never, in all the time we’ve known each other, said a single word to Aaron about Sawyer. “Yeah,” I tell him after a moment. “That was him.”

Aaron turns the key in the ignition. “I thought he’d be taller,” is all he says.

14

Before

I got stung by a wasp the morning of Allie’s funeral service. It was three wet, humid days after she wrapped her cute little car around a tree three blocks outside her parents’ development, thus leaving this world for the next in a spectacular act of theatrical stupidity so distinctly Allie that in some crazy, perverse way it made me miss her even more than I already did.

She’d been drunk, was the news that spread through school the week it happened, her blood alcohol level a tenth of a point over the legal limit for an adult in the state of Florida, never mind that Allie was sixteen years old. Grief counselors set up shop in the office. We sat through a mandatory assembly about the dangers of drunk driving; kids pinned purple ribbons to the straps of their backpacks. Apparently Lauren Werner got questioned by the cops.

It was Wednesday, and raining. I kept waiting to cry.

A flaming red welt the size of a walnut on the back of my knee seemed as good a reason as any to give up on this particular day, and I camped out in bed from the time we got home from church until Soledad knocked on