How to Love

my door just before the dinner rush. “Enough, girlfriend,” she said, hitting the switch and filling the room with tepid yellow light. “You gotta get up.”

“I’m sleeping,” I muttered into the pillow, even though I wasn’t. I’d spent the afternoon hidden under the quilt and wide awake, tracing the wobbly line of a crack in the plaster ceiling and waiting for her footsteps on the stairs. My knee itched and smarted. I’d scratched until it bled.

“Cade says you’re on the schedule for tonight.”

“Cade’s a filthy liar.”

I heard my father pause in the doorway, the slow cadence of his heavy tread. The AC swished and muttered, asthmatic. “Leave her be, Sol. I can call somebody to fill in.”

“Leo—” she began, ready to fight him. I think I was freaking her out.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, throwing off the quilt. “I’ll get up.”

“Are you sure?” My father was unconvinced. I wondered if he was thinking about my mother, about funeral flowers and headstones and lives cut short too soon. I wondered what would have happened if I asked him. We hardly ever talked about my mom.

“Sure,” I lied instead, heaving my heavy self up off the mattress. “I’ll meet you at the car in ten minutes.”

“He’s worried about you,” Soledad said when he was gone, opening my closet and reaching for my black work pants. Her long, dark hair hung loosely down her back.

I swung my feet over the side of the bed and shrugged. “You’re not?”

“I’m waiting for you to talk to me, Reena. But if you don’t want to do that—”

“I have to get dressed,” I interrupted, “if you want me to go to work.”

“Watch your tone, please.” Soledad tossed the pants in my direction, plus a white blouse that had, frankly, seen better days. She’d asked me three times what had happened the night of the accident, where I’d been and why I’d lied and what I was doing with Sawyer to begin with. She thought I was holding out on purpose, a surly teenager thing, or that maybe I’d been at the party myself and knew something I wasn’t saying. I couldn’t tell her that the truth was a million times worse. “But fine, have it your way. You might want to put a little blush on before you go.”

I frowned. “Thanks a lot.”

“It’s after five, sweetheart. I’m trying to move things along. Put something on that leg, too, or you’ll be at it all night.”

The restaurant was packed, the soupy heat of summer in Florida overcoming the industrial air-conditioning, sweat pooling in the creases of my elbows. Sawyer was missing from behind the overflowing bar. “Hiya, chickie,” his dad greeted me instead, pulling pint glasses from the dishwasher and arranging them in towering stacks beside the taps. Roger was tall and solid, quick smile and a temper to match. He flipped up the hatch and came toward me, slung a familiar arm around my shoulders. “You hangin’ in?”

I nodded, extricated myself as politely as I could manage. I really didn’t feel like being touched. “I’m okay,” I told him, the lie like a getaway car. All I wanted was for nobody to talk to me for the foreseeable future, to curl myself up into the smallest of balls and disappear.

The night melted by. I delivered order after order of Finch’s cornmeal-fried catfish and smiled blandly at dozens of customers, losing myself in the hum and clatter of forks on plates and the steady one-two step of the band set up by the bar. I’d almost managed to wipe every stray thought from my head when I rounded a corner, slammed into one of the cocktail waitresses, and sent a full tray crashing to the tile floor.

It was only a couple of dishes, broken china the busboys could take care of in under a minute, but it was enough to completely undo me. I hurried through the breezeway toward the patio, ducking around a barback and squeezing past the line for the ladies’ room. My heart was a trembling snare inside my chest. Why did you think you could do this? I wondered desperately, edging around one of the prep cooks idling on his break. It’s not working.

“What’s not working?” That was Cade, materializing behind me in all his football-star, Abercrombie glory and catching my arm. I hadn’t even realized I’d spoken aloud and was burning under his close big-brother scrutiny. I really, really didn’t want to talk.

“Too hot in here,” I muttered, brushing past him. “Patio open?”

“It’s raining,” he warned even as he stepped back. I think he was afraid of me, too.

“It’s always raining. I’ll be fine.”

I left him behind and pushed through the double glass doors. The sprawling back patio was sanctuary-silent, deserted owing to the rain, which, I realized now as I stood beneath it, wasn’t really rain at all but the kind of sneaky mist you can’t even feel until the moment you notice you’re somehow soaking wet. Milkweed wound through the wrought-iron fence; white lights twinkled in the palm trees. A few deep breaths and my frantic heart had almost slowed before I realized I wasn’t alone.

“Oh!” I yelped when I saw him, sitting with his head bent and his elbows on his knees on the giant glider at the far end of the yard. It was reflex, just the one skittish syllable. I stopped so fast I almost tripped.

Sawyer glanced up with the barest flicker of interest, stared like he didn’t know who I was. I’d seen him that morning at the funeral and the blankness of his expression had intrigued me, made me wonder if there was anything beating and alive beneath it. Even close up, there was no way to tell.

“Sorry,” I said, almost over my shoulder as I turned to run away from this place forever, or probably just for tonight. We hadn’t talked since the scene at the hospital. I couldn’t imagine what we’d possibly begin to say. “I didn’t … nobody told me you were out here. Sorry.”

“No,” Sawyer said, not entirely friendly. “You’re all right. Stay.”

I stopped and looked at him. He was still wearing his clothes from that morning, gray tie hanging loose from his neck, funeral shoes shining like onyx. In church he’d kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. “I don’t think—I should really—”

“I mean it.” He glanced at me sideways. “Don’t look so scared, Serena. I’m not going to hurt you.”

God, that wasn’t what I was afraid of, not by a long shot: What scared me was that I was a person capable of still feeling the things I felt for him after everything that had happened. What scared me was that my best friend was gone. Sawyer was the one person in the world who could maybe understand that, the one person who knew what we’d done, and for a second I almost told him everything: why Allie and I had stopped being friends to begin with, how I’d wanted him for so long I didn’t even remember what it was like not to. In the end I chickened out instead. “I’m not,” I lied, shaking my head like even the idea was ridiculous.

Sawyer snorted, a low animal noise. He slid over and made room. “Prove it,” he said.

“I … Fine.” Annoyed and bewildered and unprepared, I crossed the expanse of patio between us and perched carefully on the edge of the glider. He smelled faintly of soap and sweat and the air was warmer near him, like his body gave off more heat than normal. “Here I am.”

“Here you are.” He was holding a half-empty green bottle and he ran his thumb once around the rim, offered it to me without looking me in the face. “You working?”

“Yeah.” I took it from him, wrapping my hands around the cool glass and hoping he wouldn’t notice if I didn’t actually drink any of it. “Well, sort of.” There was a feeling in my chest like a moth against a windowpane, the desperate scrape of wings. “I just broke a bunch of plates.”

Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “On purpose?” he asked.

“No.”

“No,” he repeated, looking at me finally, smiling a small, languid smile I’d seen a hundred times before in the decade and a half I’d lived on his periphery. “I guess not.”

Sawyer sighed. I waited. We sat quiet as death and just as still and listened to the wasps as they sang their elegies high in the leaves above our heads.

15

After