leaned forward a bit, almost conspiratorial. She looked excited for me. “Is that something you might be interested in working toward?”
It took me a minute to absorb that information.
Ms. Bowen took my hesitation as reluctance; she cocked her glossy head to the side, the same sympathetic pose I’d imagined earlier. “Of course, you certainly don’t have to,” she amended. “I know plenty of students who wouldn’t want to miss out on being a senior, and everything that goes with it. I just wanted to let you know that you had the opt—”
“I’d love to,” I interrupted quickly. I thought of airplanes and huge, drafty lecture halls, locks on cages springing free. “What do you need me to do?”
What Ms. Bowen needed me to do was pretty simple, at least for the time being: keep doing well in my classes, make a list of the schools I wanted to apply to, and get myself an SAT study book. “We’ll find you some volunteer work for the summer,” she promised, eyes shining like maybe she was just as excited about the prospect of pulling this off as I was. “Beef up your transcripts a bit.”
In May, two of the waitresses quit, so on top of the extra studying I worked like a demon, three nights a week and then doubles every weekend. I lived in black pants and a starchy white shirt. My father and Roger bought Antonia’s when I was a little girl and I’d been waiting tables just about that long, knew the menu and the regulars all by heart. The truth is, I’d always liked being there: the place all tin ceiling and subway tiles, white linen tablecloths like a hundred communion dresses. There was always a band set up by the bar.
The guys playing tonight were some of my favorites, a quasi-ridiculous oldies ensemble who covered a lot of Sam Cooke, and I sang along under my breath while I zipped a couple of credit cards through the computer beside the bar. Sometime during the second verse I realized I wasn’t alone: Sawyer was leaning against the hatch and watching me, a wry, secret smile on his face.
I snapped my jaw shut, blushing and surprised: Sawyer wasn’t even
Sawyer shrugged and just kept standing, like he had no place in the world to be other than here. “I’m not teasing,” he told me, and in truth, he didn’t actually seem to be. “‘Bring It On Home to Me’? That’s a good song.”
“That’s a
“You sound like your dad.”
“Nah. He likes Otis Redding.” I tore a receipt out of the printer, smiled back. “What are you doing here?”
Sawyer tilted his head. “Looking for you.”
“Right.” I snorted, slipping the cards back into the billfolds. “Your mom was floating around earlier.” Lydia wasn’t super involved in the day-to-day running of the restaurant, though her fingerprints were everywhere if you knew where to look: the formal antique portraits affixed to the doors of the restrooms, the Edison bulbs hanging above the bar. Lydia was an artist herself, a photographer, but her family had made a fortune with a chain of successful steak houses up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and she probably had a better head for the food business than either Roger or my dad. She’d turn up from time to time, watchful, an expression on her face like she was working out secret sums in her mind. The busboys were all terrified of her; Shelby called her Dragon Lady behind her back. I tried to stay out of her way.
The one person Lydia never seemed to turn her cool, eagle-eyed artist’s scrutiny on was Sawyer. He was her only son, her Best Beloved: He’d had surgery when he was a baby to repair a literal hole in his heart, a fact Allie and I had always thought was enormously, unbearably romantic, and as long as I’d known Lydia she’d been ferociously protective of him. “She probably makes you have a blood test before you’re allowed to be his girlfriend,” Allie’d hypothesized at my house late one night, both of us dissolving into giggles—not that it seemed to have stopped her, in the end.
I was about to head back toward the floor when Sawyer reached out and grabbed me by the wrist. “Reena.” There was something urgent and unexpected about the way he said it, like he’d almost told me a secret and then changed his mind. “Why don’t I ever see you around anymore?”
I blinked at him, disbelieving. He was still holding on to my arm. “Maybe I’m better at hiding than you thought.”
Sawyer took just long enough to answer that I was sure he had no idea what I was talking about: It had been a long time since that night in Allie’s yard, after all, and he’d probably forgotten it immediately. I was about to back-pedal when he smiled. “Maybe,” he said, letting go but not moving away at all. “But I’m serious.”
“Yeah, well.” I felt my eyebrows arc. “Me, too.”
“What are you doing tonight?” he asked.
I cocked my head, glanced around. The band had segued into “It’s All Right.” I could see my father talking to a couple of regulars at the other end of the bar. “Working?” I said.
Sawyer rolled his eyes at me. “Thank you, princess. I mean after that.”
“Going home?”
“Come hang out.”
“With you?” I blurted, and Sawyer smirked, lazy as the Cheshire cat disappearing from the tree.
“Yeah, Reena. With me.”
In all the years I had known him—and I’d known him, more or less, since I was born—Sawyer had never once asked me to go anywhere. It took me a second to recover. Still, I shook my head like an instinct, like something I knew in my gut. I thought of the party at Allie’s, Lauren Werner and the crowds of people I didn’t know how to navigate. “Listen, Sawyer. Allie and I don’t really …” I trailed off, tried again, wondered what she’d told him. “I mean, we’re not so much … hanging out.”
Sawyer frowned, and there was that expression again, like he’d come here to tell me something specific. “I didn’t mean with Allie,” he said.
Oh.
“Oh,” I said. I looked at him for a moment, then back over at my father with his coffee and his grin. “Sawyer—”
“Come on, Reena,” he said, already slightly impatient. I got the feeling this was all the convincing he was going to try to do. “It’s just me.”
I thought of Allie and of valuables gone missing: of lip gloss slipped in pockets and crushes filched right out from under your nose. No matter how I tried to justify it, this was a capital crime of friendship. It was treason, even if she’d done it first.
“Yeah,” I said. Behind me the music was ending, one final chord and the crash of a snare. “Yeah, I can hang out.”
9
After
After church I take Hannah back to the house for lunch and strap her into the high chair, slicing some fruit to keep her busy while I toast some wheat bread. “Hey, lady, can you say
