How to Love

“Card games and Bringing Up Baby?” Allie frowned. The air was swampy out here, oppressive. I wanted to hop on my bike and speed away. “Is that what you want to do, really? Is that still fun to you? Come on, Reena,” she prodded when I didn’t answer. “People like you. They all just think you don’t like them.”

“I mean,” I said. “I don’t like them, generally.”

“You don’t even know them!” she exploded, then, nastily: “You like Sawyer.”

And that—God. That stung.

“Okay.” I stood up then, wiped my clammy palms on the rain-wet backside of my jeans, because nope, nope, we were not going to have that conversation, not now—not when I was already feeling weird and lonely and homesick, embarrassed by everything I wanted and didn’t have. I glanced up at the row of palm trees at the property line, trying to keep it together. Suddenly even the backyard felt sinister, familiar places gone threatening and strange in the dark. “You want to win this fight, Al, you can win this fight, that’s cool. I’ll see you.”

“You’re right,” she said immediately, getting up and following me across the lawn. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be bitchy.”

“Oh, really?” I stopped and stared at her, hands on my hips. I wanted to hit rewind on this night and on this summer, for this bizarre alternate universe to bend over on itself again and for everything to go back to the way it was supposed to be. Ever wish you were eight years old?

“No!” she exclaimed. “I’m trying to have a conversation with you. Jesus! I miss you! I want to talk to you about stuff.”

“Really,” I repeated coldly, and Allie rolled her eyes. “Like what, exactly?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged, almost helpless, skinny hands fluttering in front of her like dragonflies. “You know what I mean. He’s … I don’t know. He’s not what we thought he was.”

“He’s a vampire?” I deadpanned.

That made her mad. “Okay,” Allie said angrily. “You want to win this fight, Reena? You can win it. You can ice me out. But I’m just trying to be honest with you. I know you think I’m this horrible person, and I know you think I did this horrible thing, like I stole him from you or something—”

“I never said that—”

“But I did you a favor. If you can’t handle coming to my house and playing flip cup with Lauren Werner, you definitely couldn’t handle having sex with Sawyer LeGrande.”

I reeled for a second. I stood there. I thought, very clearly, of the word devastated.

“Look, Reena.” As soon as it was out there Allie knew she’d crossed some boundary, some line of demarcation so clearly marked that once she’d breached it our lives would always be divided into when we were little kids and when we weren’t, neatly bisected into the then and the now. I looked at her for one more moment, and then I turned around. Thunder rumbled over my head, loud and ominous, a storm about to break.

“Reena,” Allie called behind me, more forcefully this time, but by then I was already gone.

7

After

One thing about living in South Florida is that everywhere you go is violently air-conditioned, the tabernacle included. It’s sixty-five degrees inside Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal when we walk into church on Sunday, has been since God invented HVAC. Forever and ever, amen.

We’re church families, the LeGrandes and us: christenings and confirmations, spaghetti dinners and Sunday school. My father and Soledad were married in this building. In middle school I used to stop in to light candles for my mom. Even at my most miserable and lonely and pregnant I sat right behind Sawyer’s parents every weekend in the seventh pew on the right, and though I think that at this point his family and mine love and hate each other with equal intensity, the Profession of Faith is just one more thing we’ve always done together, world without end.

Today I’ve barely gotten Hannah’s sausage-link arms into the sweater Soledad finished just this week when Sawyer sidles in flanked by Roger and Lydia, his hands shoved deep into his dark jeans and sunglasses hanging from the V of his button-down. Everyone, even Sawyer, wears a collared shirt to church.

“Hey, everybody,” he whispers, as they slide into the row in front of us. My father ignores him. My brother only glares. His wife, Stefanie, is gaping a little in a way that makes me want to smack her across her round, curious face: Yes, Stef, he’s good-looking. Yes, Stef, he’s back.

Jesus Christ, everybody. Pull it together.

Soledad is apparently the only member of my family with a modicum of grace, not that this comes as any kind of revelation. “Hi, Sawyer,” she says to him, voice tempered as always by traces of a childhood spent in Cuba. Beside him, his mother is glowing, radiating light, and why shouldn’t she be? Just like the story promised, her prodigal returned. “It’s good to see you.”

He kisses Soledad’s cheek before he turns to look at Hannah, and for nearly a full minute they stare at each other, silent. There is a moment when I do not breathe. Sawyer has always been full of nervous habits, perpetually tapping his fingers or rubbing hard at a muscle at his neck—it’s part of what makes girls fall in love with him—but now he goes still as winter, like the blood has dried up in his veins.

Lydia clears her throat. Hannah fidgets. Sawyer looks at me like I’ve broken his beating heart.

“Nice work,” is all he says, and I laugh.

Back when we were together I used to spend my Sunday mornings in church poking Sawyer in the back, waiting until no one was looking and quietly snapping the elastic on the boxers peeking out the rear of his pants. He’d reach behind and grab my hand, the two of us thumb wrestling until Soledad or Lydia noticed and elbowed one or both of us in the side. “Pay attention,” they’d hiss, and then turn back to the priest and pretty much leave us to our own devices.

We were sweethearts. It’s a thing that happened. It’s over now. It’s fine.

Halfway through the psalm and Hannah’s wriggles turn to whimpers; her body is thermal and heavy in my arms. She’s crabby, is all. She didn’t sleep well last night—neither of us slept very well last night, if you want to know the truth—but in this second it feels like she’s on to me, all terrifying toddler intuition. In this second it feels like she knows.

I scoop her up and head for the aisle, because in another second we’re both going to lose it, right in the middle of a reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: Behold, I tell you a mystery. We burst through the doors at the back, straight into a blinding shock of light.

“I never liked Paul much anyway,” I tell Hannah once we’re hidden away in the courtyard outside the church, a flagstone patio peopled by half a dozen life-size statues of angels and saints, like some kind of weird religious cocktail party hosted by the apostle Bartholomew. I set Hannah on her feet and let her walk. Summer in Broward County is brutal and haunted, all palm trees and the green tangle of sea grapes wound around the grotto on the lawn. Hannah grabs at a cluster of Spanish moss with her pudgy starfish hands. “Oh, boy,” I say. “Whatcha got over there, chick?”

“Oh, boy,” she repeats, and I grin. Hannah’s a hugely beautiful kid, dark-haired and sloe-eyed, even taking into account the fact that I grew her inside my body and therefore might possibly be a little prejudiced. Strangers stop and say she’s beautiful all the time. “Oh, boy!”

I sit down on a wooden bench to watch her. A taciturn Virgin Mary holds court on top of a dried-up fountain at the edge of the patio, a missing chunk of plaster where her veil should meet her dress. I think of my own mom, whom I hardly remember—just a waterfall of dark hair and the faint smell of lavender—and wonder if she’d have any secrets to share. I run my thumb over the jagged edge of stone, waiting. Soledad prays to Mary for virtually everything and swears that Mary answers every time, but if either this mother or mine have any advice to