How to Love

I’m talking about. “Hanging out by the Slurpees.”

Soledad takes a moment to process that information, then: “What flavor?”

I blink at her. “What flavor?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Watch it,” she reminds me, and I look guiltily at Hannah. Already my kid is toddling and full of jabber, gobbling the universe with a terrific kind of greed, and I know it’s only a matter of time before she gets to preschool and starts asking her teacher why today’s snack is so shitty.

“Sorry,” I mutter, planting a kiss against her warm, downy head as she smashes a little bit of tomato into my face. “Your mom is a trash mouth.”

“Did you skip your class?” Soledad asks, and I’m about to tell her exactly where community college falls on my list of priorities in this particular moment when my brother lets himself in through the back door, my father close behind him. There was a managers’ meeting at the restaurant this afternoon, I remember all of a sudden.

“Ladies.” Cade glances at me briefly, heads directly for the fridge. He was a fullback on our high school’s football team, once upon a time, and he still eats like he’s bulking up for a game. “Saw Aaron at the gym this morning.”

I ignore him—and the reference to my boyfriend—as if I haven’t even heard. “Did you know Sawyer is home?” I ask instead. I don’t mean to sound as crazy as I do, so close to hysterical; I take a deep breath, bounce Hannah on my hip, and try to contain the overflow. “Did you?”

“No,” Cade says immediately, but suddenly he won’t look at me and the back of my neck is prickling. He frowns at the contents of the refrigerator, like there’s something really interesting going on in there. “Did you drink all the OJ?” he asks.

“Kincade, I am going to ask you again—”

“What?” He sounds pissed at me now, irritated. “I didn’t know, exactly—”

“Cade!”

“Reena.” My father steps between us like we’re seven and twelve instead of eighteen and twenty-three, like maybe I’m about to pull some bratty little-sister move involving a shin-kick or a punch to the back of the head. Like maybe I’m not standing here holding a child of my own. “Enough,” he says, and I turn on him. My father and Sawyer’s have been friends since they were children; they’ve owned the restaurant for more than a decade, are godfathers to each other’s sons. There is no way in the breathing world that if Sawyer LeGrande so much as crossed the state line into Florida, my father didn’t hear about it.

“What about you?” I demand, trying to keep my voice steady. His hair is going gray at the temples. Hannah squirms unhappily in my arms. “You must have known.”

My father nods. “Yes,” he says, and looks at me evenly. One thing he never does is lie.

“And you didn’t tell me?”

He doesn’t reply for a minute, like he’s thinking. Dark spots from the rainstorm are flecked across his shirt. “No,” he says, when he’s ready. “I didn’t.”

None of this is new information, but still it hits like something with physical force, a pillowcase full of nickels or God sending a flood for forty days. “Why not?” I ask, and it comes out a lot sadder than I mean it to.

“Reena—”

“Soledad, please.”

“I didn’t tell you he was here,” my father says slowly, and he is the very theology of calm, “because I was hoping he wasn’t going to stay.”

Well.

All three of them are looking at me, waiting. Soledad’s got a hand pressed to her heart. Cade is still standing at the refrigerator, all bulk and muscle, watchful.

“OJ’s in the door,” I tell him finally, and take Hannah upstairs for her nap.

4

Before

“We’re getting too old for this,” Allie declared suddenly. We were wasting the morning on the swing set at the far corner of her parents’ huge, immaculate backyard: just the two of us, just like usual, her corn-yellow hair brushing the grass as she leaned back as far as she could.

“We are too old for it,” I said. I was lying upside down on the plastic slide, knees bent, hands groping without luck for a dandelion or some crabgrass to pick at. Allie’s dad was fanatical about the lawn. We were fifteen that summer, not quite driving, perpetually bumming rides off a couple of Allie’s older friends. “That’s the point. Shut up and swing.”

“Fine,” she said, laughing. “Maybe I will.” Then, on second thought, righting herself with a dizzy shake of her head: “Want to go get coffee?”

I frowned. In a minute it was going to be too hot to keep lying like this, but the reason Allie wanted to go get coffee was because her friend Lauren Werner worked at Bump and Grind and gave out free iced mochas, and I hated Lauren Werner’s guts. “Do you want coffee?”

Allie considered that one for a moment, eyes narrowing behind her enormous tortoiseshell sunglasses. “No,” she said eventually, heaving a put-upon sigh. “I just want to go someplace.”

I was about to suggest an early movie, or maybe coffee at the bookstore instead, but just then her mom appeared at the sliding door to the kitchen, her hair the same perfect blond as Allie’s but bobbed short and sensible. “Girls?” she called, leaning against the doorjamb, one bare foot coming up to scratch her opposite knee. “I made muffins, if you’re hungry!”

“Don’t fall for it,” Allie said immediately. “They’re full of flax.”

“Don’t tell her that!” her mom yelled back. Mrs. Ballard had ears like a bat. “They are not. Just try one, Reena.”

“Okay,” I agreed, after a moment. I was agreeable in general, and anyway I had to pee. I flipped myself backward off the slide and wandered toward the house across the deep, lucid green of the grass, the heat like a wall of syrup even this early in the day. “I’m coming.”

“Get cards, too!” Allie called, any and all plans for leaving the yard suddenly forgotten. We were playing only old-person card games that summer: bridge and pinochle, euchre and hearts. It was this thing Allie had us doing, the latest in a long sequence of summers with themes like French Braid Pigtails and The Katharine Hepburn Movie Canon. “And paper and pen!”

“Anything else”—I shot her a look over my shoulder—“Your Majesty?”

Allie grinned her biggest and goofiest, flinging one rubber flip-flop off her foot in my general direction. “Pleeease?”

“We’ll see.”

I peed and got the cards from her bedroom and opened the makeup case on her dresser, digging around for the Risky Business lip gloss I knew she’d gotten at the mall earlier that week. I pulled out some eye shadow and a couple of tampons but didn’t see it, and was about to give up when my fingers curled around a tarnished, silver half-moon on a thin rope that I recognized—immediately, without even thinking about it, the way you recognize your own face in the mirror—as Sawyer LeGrande’s.

I blinked. I swallowed. I stood there for I don’t know how long, central air humming quietly in the background and my bare feet sinking into the pale gray wall-to-wall carpet, fresh with vacuum marks from the Ballards’ cleaning lady, Valencia. Finally I went outside—right past Mrs. Ballard, who was holding a paper plate with two flaxseed blueberry muffins, the thought of which, suddenly, made me feel a little sick.

Allie looked up as I approached. She was hanging from the rings at this point, flipping herself over and over like we’d done when we were small, tan legs kicking. “Where’s the poison muffins?” she asked. Then, seeing my face: “What?”