should have gone home, actually—I’d joined the school paper at Ms. Bowen’s behest and was writing an Around Town column about street festivals and new stores on Federal Highway. I had 250 words on a sculpture park near the beach due first thing Monday morning. “I can stick around for a while.”
Sawyer noticed my plate once my father had gone and Cade, flush with his new managerial responsibilities, went back to the office to run the night’s totals. “Aw, not fair,” he said, his face a sad, silly caricature. “Finch made you pancakes?”
I nodded happily, digging into the fluffy stack sitting on my plate. “Finch loves me.”
“And really, who can blame him?” Sawyer hooked a pair of wineglasses onto the rack above his head. Then he reached across the bar, took my fork out of my hand, and helped himself to a big bite.
“Oh, come on!” I cried, playing at irritated. “Get your own.”
“Yours are better,” he said, mouth full.
I huffed a little, delighted and trying not to look it. “You know, not all of us want your germs.”
“Reena,” he replied mildly, handing back the fork. “You already got my germs.”
I froze for just one second, and then I started to laugh. It was the closest we’d come to talking about it—the only indication he’d given me that he even remembered it had happened—and hearing him say it loosened some knot I hadn’t even realized was pressing on the muscles in my chest. I giggled like a maniac for a minute, absurdly relieved, crazy hyena giggles, like I hadn’t laughed in a year. “Shut up,” I managed, once I finally got my breath.
“There you go, Reena.” Sawyer grinned, revealing two perfectly straight rows of white teeth. “You’re so serious all the time, I swear. I crack you and it makes my damn night.”
“Yeah, well.” I took a breath, calmed down a bit. “I do what I can.”
“Mm-hmm.” Sawyer wandered over to the piano and made himself comfortable on the bench. Though my father put a down payment on Antonia’s all those years ago in part so he’d always have a place to play his music, it only took a couple of months for him to realize that the care and keeping of a restaurant required more time and effort than he had anticipated. Now he sat at the baby grand only once or twice a month, a special occasion. The rest of the time, he booked bands.
“Any requests, ma’am?” Sawyer asked, clever hands already splayed over the keys. He started with a few quick scales, flew through the opening of a Dave Matthews song that was one of Cade’s favorites, then launched into some West Coast–style jazz I knew my father must have taught him. Dave Brubeck, I recognized after a moment. Car-commercial music.
“I wish everybody was that easy. Come sit.”
I slid off the barstool and onto the piano bench. Somewhere in the back of my head I thought of the old pictures I’d seen of my parents sitting at the upright in my grandmother’s house, the dark gaze of my mother, Antonia herself, fixed on my father’s young face as he played.
“You should wear your hair down more,” Sawyer said, glancing at me, hands moving fast through a piece I didn’t know. Our thighs were touching. “It looks nice like that.”
I laughed, but Sawyer just shook his head. “I’m serious,” he said, still playing. His voice went low and quiet. “I noticed you, you know that? Even before last spring I did.”
“Yeah.” Sawyer shrugged. “You’re just … different.”
“Different,” I repeated. I thought of Lauren Werner, of the fact that at this very moment, everybody else in my grade was at Homecoming except for me. I got tired of being different, is the truth of it. It wore on me. “What, from Allie?”
That was the wrong thing to say. Sawyer kept his fingers on the keys, didn’t miss a chord, but his whole body tensed. I thought of the strings inside the piano. “Sorry,” I said, backpedaling. I hadn’t even meant to bring her up, not overtly—she was just on my mind so much, still, like the six months since the car crash hadn’t done anything to dull how much I missed her. You’d think losing her almost a full year before she actually died would have cushioned the blow, somehow; instead I just felt it more and more. “I shouldn’t have—I just meant—”
“It’s fine,” Sawyer said shortly, but for the first time all night I didn’t like the sound of his voice. I wondered how much he thought about her. I wondered if he thought about her at all.
“Okay, but …”
“I said it’s okay, Reena.”
We sat in awkward, testy silence for a moment until Cade emerged from the kitchen. “Taking requests?” he asked, then noticed our stony faces and looked, sort of accusingly, at Sawyer. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said too loudly, keeping my expression as neutral as humanly possible and feeling certain that I’d just pulled this apart, whatever it even was, faster than I’d known it could be destroyed. “Everything’s great.”
19
After
I’ve got a midterm to take in the Modern American Novel, a class I was sort of excited about when it turned up in the Broward College course catalog last semester, which just goes to show how delusional I really am. For some reason I was picturing lively, sophisticated conversations about the great writers of the last few generations; instead the lecture is delivered by a fleshy middle-aged professor who’s not so much boring as blatantly bored, who eyes us with vague pity through an owly pair of glasses and periodically administers multiple-choice quizzes I’m fairly certain he’s printing off the Internet. “You are my penance for a misspent life,” he announced on the first day of class, before assigning
This morning I park my car and head down the chilly hallway toward the classroom, past the bulletin board with flyers for intramural flag football games and two-for-one happy hour at a bar near campus. Par for the course, I don’t have a hell of a lot in common with my classmates, although I feel like at this point that’s absolutely more my fault than theirs. I’ve been to coffee a couple of times with some girls from my accounting class, but for the most part my time at BC has not been the social bonanza Shelby hoped it might be. Basically it feels a lot like high school, only without gym.
I sit down at one of the long tables and tick the appropriate boxes with my number 2 pencil, then hand in my test at the front of the room where good old Professor Orrin is reading the
Allie’s old house has been empty for ages: Her parents moved to Tampa not long after the accident, and the new owners foreclosed inside a year. It just sits there in the swooping curve of the cul-de-sac now, gap-toothed and vaguely haunted-looking, waiting for whatever’s coming next.
Allie’s buried at Forest Lawn, but I’ve never been much for cemeteries, and anyway, whoever’s beneath that headstone—
This afternoon, though—half a week since our date at the playground, who knows how long since my father looked me in the eye—I’m not the only one hanging around the Ballards’ old development. Sawyer’s rusty Jeep is parked in the driveway, unmistakable. I shake my head, disbelieving, as if there’s some invisible string that kept us tethered the entire time he was away and that’s tightening now, a slip-knot hooked around my wrist.
