How to Love

Before

“Gin,” Allie said triumphantly, dropping her last card onto my quilted bedspread and raising her sharp chin in victory. “You’re finished.”

“Ugh. Seriously?” I flopped back onto the pillows, dropped my feet into her lap. We’d spent most of the afternoon mired in a ridiculously complicated version of rummy governed by a rigid and intricate roster of house rules we’d never been able to explain to anyone else—which didn’t actually matter, seeing as how the only people we ever played with were each other. “I quit.”

“It’s not quitting if you already lost,” she said, reaching over to my dresser and scrolling through the music on my laptop. The sunny pop she liked best chorused from the tinny speakers. “At that point it’s just … conceding.”

I laughed and kicked at her a bit, just gently. “Jerk.”

“You are.”

“Your mom is.”

We hung out in silence for a little while, comfortable and familiar. Allie picked idly at a fray in the hem of my jeans. On the wall was a poster of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, another of Paris at dusk—both speckled with little grease spots in the corners from the tacky stuff I’d used to position and reposition them until they were just exactly right. It was the spring of our freshman year, almost summer; the world felt endless and impossibly small.

“Hey, girls?” My stepmother, Soledad, appeared in the doorway, dark hair knotted neatly on top of her head. “Roger and Lyd’ll be here any minute,” she said to me. “Can you come down and set the table for me? Allie, honey,” she continued, not bothering to wait for my reply—I’d say yes, obviously. I always said yes. “Do you want to stay for dinner?”

Allie frowned, glancing at the alarm clock on my night-stand. “I should probably get home,” she said, sighing. She’d gotten busted for shoplifting again a couple of weeks before, a pair of plastic sunglasses and a silky scarf from the Gap this time, and her parents were keeping her on a pretty tight leash. “Thanks, though.”

“Okay.” Soledad smiled and tapped the doorjamb twice before she turned around, the delicate metal of her wedding ring clicking against the paint. “Make sure you set an extra place, Serena, will you?” she called over her shoulder. “Sawyer’s coming tonight, too, I think.”

Right away Allie and I looked at each other, eyes going wide. “I can stay,” she announced immediately, bolting upright like a prairie dog. “I’ll call my … uh. Yeah. I can definitely stay.”

I laughed so hard I almost fell right off the bed, thinking even as I tried to pull it together that I was going to need to put on some makeup. “You are so obvious,” I said, heaving myself up and onto the carpet, heading for the hallway as casually as somebody whose heart wasn’t jackhammering inside her chest. “Come on, nerd. You can fold the napkins.”

* * *

Lydia LeGrande blew into the kitchen like a tropical storm twenty minutes later, all confidence and chunky necklaces, dropping a cursory kiss on my cheek. “How you doing, Reena?” she asked, not waiting for me to answer before setting a tray of fancy cheese on the counter and peeling the plastic wrap away. Roger followed with a bottle of wine, navigating his considerable bulk with surprising deftness, and put a hand at my upper back to say hello. “Hiya, chickie,” he said.

The LeGrandes were my father and Soledad’s closest friends, partners both in the restaurant where we all worked and for vacations down to the Keys, outdoor concerts at Holiday Park. Their games of Outburst were loud and legendary. Lydia had gone to college with my mom. She and Roger had introduced my mother and father to begin with, and when my mother died of complications from multiple sclerosis when I was four and my father was too busy raging at God to think about things like lunches and clean socks, Lydia was the one who hired Soledad to move in with us, not realizing at the time that she’d found him a second wife just like she’d found him a first. A little over a decade later and they still came for dinner often—but not, for the most part, with their son.

Tonight, though, luck was in my corner or the moons of some far-off planet were aligned, because sure enough, Sawyer skulked in behind them, jeans and a T-shirt and his dark, wavy hair. Around his neck was the tiny half-moon pendant he always wore, tarnished and thin. “You,” my father said to him by way of greeting, ambling in from the yard where he’d been lighting up the grill. Allie and I were still setting the table; she was clutching a handful of forks. “I have a record I want you to listen to. An actual record. Herbie Hancock. Come with me.”

“My son’s in a mood,” Roger muttered, warning, but Sawyer just kissed Soledad hello and nodded at my father, following him out into the living room where the big stereo was. Sawyer was his godson, had grown up drifting through the crowded hallways of our house; my father had taught him to play the piano more than a decade before.

“Hey, Reena,” he said distractedly, nodding at me as he passed by—close enough that I could smell him, soapy and faintly warm. I’d seen him at work a few days earlier. He hadn’t come for dinner in nearly a year.

I swallowed, heart tapping at my rib cage like pebbles at a windowpane. “Hey.”

Sawyer was two years ahead of us at school, a junior, although he seemed way older—closer to my brother Cade’s age than mine. He’d always been that way, for as long as I could remember, like he’d already lived a thousand different lives. He tended bar at the restaurant and showed up to class when he felt like it and ignored me, for the most part: not in a malicious way, but in the way that you ignore a message on the side of a building you see every day. I was part of the scenery, blending in, so familiar as to be completely invisible to the naked eye.

Allie, though. Allie was hard to ignore.

“Hey, Sawyer,” she called out now, curly hair bouncing with the shake of her pretty head. She’d changed her clothes, borrowed one of my tank tops—simple black with skinny straps, nothing fancy. Her shoulders were covered with freckles from the sun. “Long time no see.”

Sawyer stopped and looked at her with some interest. Roger had followed Soledad onto the patio by this point; my father had disappeared into the living room. Lydia was making herself at home in the kitchen as usual, rummaging through the silverware drawer for knives to go with her cheeses. Allie just smiled.

I was watching carefully. They knew each other, sure, from any number of family parties, birthdays, and graduations. They passed each other in the hallways at school. They weren’t friends, though, not by any stretch of the imagination, which was why I was so surprised when he grinned back, slow and easy. “No kidding,” he told her, tipping his chin in her direction. “Long time no see.”

3

After

“Sawyer LeGrande is home?”

I’m livid when I stomp into the house a full two hours ahead of schedule, back from the 7-Eleven and banging my way into the kitchen with all the grace and equanimity of a hand grenade. I’ve been driving in panicky circles through the still-biblical downpour like if I don’t keep moving something bad is going to happen, like chance favors those in motion and the odds are already stacked. Outside, the palm trees bend in supplication. My car stalled at three different lights.

“What?” Soledad snaps to attention. She’s been chopping carrots at the counter and the knife clatters into the basin; she swears softly in Spanish before jerking her thumb to her mouth. Hannah, who’s sitting in her high chair macerating a gritty-skinned tomato from my father’s garden, begins to shriek. She’s small and dark-haired and fierce, my girl; when she really puts her mind to it, her howl can seem to come from a creature ten times her size. “Mama,” she wails, that last long a like the universe has totally wronged her. I tuck her against the curve of my body and begin to pace like some nervous feline, a lioness or lynx.

“It’s okay,” I lie, whispering nonsense until she quiets, watery pulp slipping through her chubby fists. “That was scary. I know. It’s okay.” I look back at my stepmother, who’s still sucking the blood from her finger and staring at me in disbelief. “Sawyer LeGrande,” I repeat, like maybe there’s possibly some other Sawyer she thinks