How to Love

inconvenient drizzle. He yelled—Jesus Christ, he yelled at me, all kinds of hateful accusations I would like never to think about again. I cried. Soledad cried. And my father cried, too.

Then the quiet came in.

Soledad crept into my bedroom some nights, rubbed my back and whispered prayers in my ears. Shelby held my hand and told me jokes. They did what they could to soothe me, to make me feel less alone; still, I spent those long foggy months sure of nothing so much as the feeling of standing on the edge of a canyon and screaming, waiting for an echo that refused to come.

51

After

And so it happens. They find a replacement for me at the restaurant; Cade gets me new tires for my van. I come home from my last day of finals—a multiple choice from Professor Orrin that, true to form, still had a URL printed across the bottom—and find Soledad and my father drinking tea in the kitchen. “Hannah napping?” I ask, dropping my schoolbag on the counter. We need to run errands for some last-minute supplies—sunscreen and notebooks, novels on tape. We’re scheduled to hit the road at the end of the week.

Soledad shakes her head, glances in my direction over her big ceramic mug. “She’s in the garden,” she tells me, once she’s swallowed. “With Sawyer.”

That is not what I’m expecting. I turn to my father, gaping a bit. He gazes back with an expression that isn’t quite a smile. “Things change,” he allows, eyebrows arcing with the barest hint of amusement. His color is much better, these days. “You of all people should know that.”

I smile back, I can’t help it, a disbelieving grin that pulls at the edges of my mouth. “I guess so,” I tell him, and head outside into the heat. Sawyer and Hannah are sitting in a lawn chair reading The Runaway Bunny, Hannah’s face flushed and sleepy and leaning back into Sawyer like she’s known him all her life. I think of the first day he held her, how starkly terrified he looked, and marvel for a moment at how fast he learned to swim. I sit on the patio to listen, pulling my feet up onto a lounge chair and waiting for the bunny to come home.

Normally by the time a book is finished, Hannah’s up and crowing for the next one, or otherwise she’s bored and wants to play; today, though, she stays where she is, like she’s waiting for something. Sawyer smoothes her dark hair back off her face. “Heard you’re going,” he says to me after a moment, eyes still on the baby—the delicate slope of her jawline, the birthmark on the side of her mouth. She looks a little bit like both of us, is the truth.

I nod and glance away myself, focus on the heavy, ripening tomato plants. It should feel more satisfying than it does that this time he’s the one who’ll be left behind. “Seems that way,” I reply.

“Thought it through?”

“Of course,” I tell him, a bit of heat behind it. I feel my shoulders straighten, think of the itinerary I’ve planned so carefully my entire life. “I’ve got money saved. I’m smart, and we’ll be safe.” I shrug. “Anything happens I don’t know how to handle, my family is a phone call away. I want Hannah to grow up seeing places, you know? I want her to always know what’s out there.”

“Easy, tiger.” Sawyer smiles, unconcerned. Hannah’s falling asleep before my very eyes. “That’s not what I meant. Of course I know you wouldn’t be going if you didn’t think it was a good idea for the baby.”

I blink, look at him for a minute. “So then …?”

“So then.” Sawyer shrugs a little himself. Still, he’s not looking at me. “I don’t know. I think I could have been a good dad.”

I close my eyes for a moment and lean back against the chaise. If you’d told me six weeks ago that this conversation even existed in the realm of human possibility, I would have laughed until my sides were sore and splitting. “I know,” is all I can think to say.

“I would never, ever ask you not to go, Reena,” he says softly. “Go. Do what you need to do. I already screwed up your plans once in this lifetime. I’m not going to do it again.” The baby’s asleep now, peaceful against his chest; Sawyer shifts her warm weight in a gesture I recognize as one I perform a hundred times a day, a series of small, necessary readjustments. “But I guess I’m just telling you I’ll be here when and if you decide to come back.”

For a second I only just stare at him. He’s got to be kidding. He’s got to be nuts. “What are you going to do, wait for me?” I ask, laughing a little. “In Broward?”

Sawyer doesn’t smile. “That’s the plan,” is all he says.

“And do what?”

He considers it for a moment, that exaggerated thinking face he puts on to disguise the fact that he’s already thought. “Who knows?” he asks finally, and I know I won’t get another straight answer out of him this afternoon as surely as I know he’s already made up his mind. “Work on my tan.”

“You’re insane,” I tell him. Sawyer cocks his head like, possibly, and I roll my eyes at him, annoyed and stupidly fond of him at the same time. A warm, wet breeze shuffles the leaves of the coconut palms. “My father just told me,” I say eventually. “That you came by before you left. I never knew that until now.”

Sawyer raises his eyebrows, nods a bit. “Yeah, well,” he says, tipping his chin in my direction. “Probably for the best, right? You said yourself you wouldn’t have come.”

“I said hypothetically.”

“You wouldn’t have,” Sawyer tells me, then smiles. Around his neck is the silver half-moon pendant he gave to Allie years and years ago, tarnished and familiar. I wonder when and how he got it back. It’s strange to see it again after all this time, pieces of our old lives slipping seamlessly into our new ones. “And you’d have been right.”

I don’t know what to say to that so I don’t say anything, picking a bit at the seam of the cushion and tilting my face up into the sun. Sawyer leans back and closes his eyes. Hannah just dozes, sweet and oblivious, secret dreams fluttering inside her baby head.

52

Before

I graduated, at least.

I sleepwalked through the ceremony, sat in my big black robe in the air-conditioned auditorium listening to the valedictorian quote Dr. Seuss and trying not to barf. Shelby sat three rows in front of me, kept glancing over her shoulder and giving me the thumbs-up. My biggest accomplishment for the day was managing to cross the stage and pick up my useless diploma without bursting into tears.

Ms. Bowen came up to me afterward, threw her arms around me in congratulations and asked to meet my family. “You made a winner here, with Reena,” she told them happily; if she was at all baffled by the fact that their collective disposition on this most auspicious of days was somewhere in the neighborhood of the Addams Family at Disneyland, she didn’t let on. “I can’t wait to hear all about how she does at Northwestern.”

There was a moment of silence then—probably only a second or two, although to me it felt like it lasted sometime between nine months and an entire lifetime. Soledad hmmed noncommitally. My father cleared his throat. I could feel them both watching me, baffled, but in the end I just smiled my widest and most artificial, told her she wasn’t the only one.

* * *

I tried to keep working my normal shifts at the restaurant, but in the end I called in so often that finally they went ahead and replaced me with someone new, a dishwater blonde with a pale, zitty complexion. She was nice enough and a decent worker, Shelby reported, but Lydia picked on her to no end. “Mama LeGrande is on the warpath,” Shelby warned me, having dropped by with a movie and a magazine and a generous side of gossip that,