How to Love

Aaron and Shelby’s mom lives in a kitschy little bungalow out in Poinsettia Heights, cool tile floors and spiny green succulents exploding like alien life-forms all over the raised deck that surrounds the pool. Hannah’s in heaven, drifting through the cool blue water in her yellow plastic baby raft, no shortage of middle-aged women in neon-flowered bathing suits to coo over her and her star-shaped kiddie sunglasses.

Eventually her small fingers go pruney, and we climb carefully up onto the deck, water from my hair running in cold rivulets down my back. Hannah’s body feels cool and slippery, like a seal’s. I wrap her in a hooded towel that looks like a bug-eyed frog and take her inside to get changed, stopping in the kitchen on our way back to pull some snacks out of the bag I packed this morning. Shelby’s rooting around in the fridge for a lime to go with her beer. “Was wondering where you got to,” she says, holding out the bottle. She’s wearing cargo shorts and flip- flops, wet hair knotted at the nape of her neck. “You want?”

I glance over the line of baby cacti on the windowsill, taking in the big, inclusive tribe in the yard. “I’m not going to drink underage in front of your entire family.”

“Oh, like anybody cares. You’re already here with your illegitimate child and they all love you. Speaking of: What about you, baby girl?” she says to Hannah. “Mai tai? Margarita?” She glances at me, frowns. “What?” she asks. “I’m kidding. I’m not actually going to make your kid a margarita. She’s a baby. That would be bad form.”

“Huh?” I blink at her, distracted, still gazing out at the crowd on the deck. “No, no. I’m sorry. I wasn’t even really listening.”

“Well, thanks,” she says faux-snottily. Then, bumping my shoulder with hers: “Hey. How you doing over there?”

I shrug, trying for a bright smile and probably missing. “I’m fine,” I promise. “Not really sleeping so well.”

“Yeah.” Shelby breaks off as two of her teenage cousins amble through the kitchen, bony elbows and legs like gazelles. “Look,” she says, when we’re alone again. “You can talk to me. I know it’s weird now because you date my goony brother and you’re hanging out with all my fat aunts and whatnot, but you talked to me before that and, you know. It doesn’t mean you can’t tell me stuff. You can tell me stuff.”

I hand the baby her Goldfish, stalling, but it’s useless to do that with Shelby. She waits me out every time. “Sawyer was at my house today,” I confess finally, eating a couple of crackers myself for good measure. “We had, you know, the talk.”

“The I know we’re really Catholic but this is where babies come from talk?” Shelby laughs, blue eyes going wide. “No offense, Reena, but you probably should have had that one like, two years ago, you know what I’m saying?”

“Oh, you’re very funny.” I make a face. “The we made a baby and here she is talk, smartass.”

“Ooh,” she says, leaning back against the counter with her beer bottle, clicking the glass mouth lightly against her front teeth. “That talk. How’d it go?”

“Fine,” I say again. “I don’t know. Nothing the rest of the universe didn’t know already, right? We’re going to hang out tomorrow, all three of us.”

“As a family?” she blurts, and I physically startle at the sound of it. Is that what we are, the three of us? That can’t possibly be what we are.

“Um, yeah,” I say after a moment. “I guess so.”

“Well.” Shelby’s quiet, and I know from experience that she’s working the logic of it out in her mind like some kind of medical puzzle: muscle and tendon, cartilage and bone.

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it? I mean, for better or for worse, Sawyer is your—”

“Don’t say it,” I plead, knowing what’s coming. Shelby loves this particular phrase.

“—baby daddy. There’s bound to be some big feelings there, or whatever, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be in your kid’s life. Right, Hannah?” she asks, taking the orange cracker the baby proffers, kissing her crumby hand. “You want your hot but degenerate father to take you to Disney World and stuff, don’t you?”

I laugh, I can’t help it. “Can you cut it out?” I beg.

“I’m teasing. I’m sorry, I’m not being helpful.” She slips her free arm around my waist as we head back out into the sunshine and noise. “Just, you know, don’t forget all the shitty stuff he did. And remember that you’re happy now.”

“Yeah,” I tell her, still distracted, glancing at the crowd around the table. Shelby’s uncles are arguing politics good-naturedly; her cousins are playing a noisy game of Marco Polo. I think again of families, hers and mine and Sawyer’s, of what exactly they look like and what exactly they do.

Shelby’s looking at me hard. “You are happy now, aren’t you?” she asks.

At the grill, Aaron is burning a hot dog because that’s how I like to eat them, a cloud of smoke like a dark corona around his face. “Yeah,” I repeat, more certainly this time. “Yeah, of course.”

16

Before

Sawyer pretty much disappeared the summer after Allie died, lying so low as to go practically subterranean, skulking around bars on the seedier side of Broward and getting into loud, rowdy fights. In June he got arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge. In July he wound up with a broken hand. In August he finally mentioned to his parents that, by the way, he had no intention whatsoever of shipping off to college like he was supposed to, which, while not exactly a revelation to anybody following along at home, had Roger and Lydia practically apoplectic and turned the restaurant into a backdrop for all kinds of huge LeGrande family drama.

“His dad flipped the hell out,” Cade told me on the ride home one night, the rain a steady patter on the windshield, the wipers a rhythmic swoosh. It’s a myth that boys don’t like to gossip: Cade in particular couldn’t keep a secret to save his life. “Said he had to move out of the house if he didn’t go to school. They dropped a lot of money on his tuition deposit.”

“That’s what I figured.” The LeGrandes were richer than us, I knew, but not rich enough that things like college deposits didn’t matter. Still, I suspected Lydia would probably be more upset than anyone else: Sawyer was, after all, the one living soul she never had a critical word for. Even if she’d never admit it to anyone, I could only imagine how much his apparent commitment to complete and total self-immolation got under her skin.

It got under mine, too, obviously, but it wasn’t like I was going to say that out loud.

The college thing sort of made sense to me, though. Even before everything happened, I remember thinking how odd it was that he was headed to FSU, Go Seminoles, just like every other senior in the state—how pedestrian, as if somebody like Sawyer should be headed for pastures way greener than keg parties or freshman seminars on the history of Western civilization. He should have been haunting cafes in New York or playing open mics in California, slouching around looking beautiful and waiting to get discovered.

Or, you know, traveling the world with some girl who was into that kind of thing.

Whatever.

“So,” I said, affecting a carefully honed poker face and glancing at Cade out of the corner of my eye. “Where’s he going to live?”

Cade shrugged. “With some friends in Dania, I think. There’s a bunch of them living in some split-level off the highway. Roger was all pissed off about that, too, because apparently you can, like, smell the meth cooking all up and down the street.”

“Sounds very attractive.” I slipped my shoes off, put my bare feet up on the dash. “Did he say why he’s not going?”

“I dunno. He’s pretty screwed up, I guess.” Here my brother hesitated, glancing at me sort of nervously. We didn’t talk very much about Allie in my house. It felt like everyone was a little bit afraid of what I might do if they brought her up—go off like an improvised explosive, maybe, glass and shrapnel everywhere you looked. Three months in the ground and it was almost like she’d never existed in the first place, like maybe she’d only ever been my imaginary friend. “Because of everything that happened.”