Katie Cotugno: How to Love

I almost turn around, just cut my losses and go—I’m still angry with him from earlier, absolutely, but that’s not the whole story, not by a long shot. I knew from the second I saw him that Sawyer turning up here was going to unearth all kinds of nastiness for my father, and just standing near him I’m hit with that familiar sear of frustration and shame. For a second I’m sixteen again, pregnant and hopeless, every careful plan for my future scattered like hayseed in a dry wind.

Still: That was before.

“How’s it going?” I venture, crossing the patio to be near him. The slate is warm under my feet.

My father glances up at me, then back at his tall, spindly plants. His doctor says gardening’s good for his heart, although that’s not why he does it. “All right, I suppose.” He sighs, rubs at a prickly green leaf with the pad of his thumb. “Worried about rot.” I watch as he moves on to the zucchini, the bright yellow summer squash. He’ll finish with Soledad’s rosebushes, just like always, pruning them back before they climb clear up the side of the house and take over like something out of a fairy tale.

We had an aboveground pool back here, once upon a time, but my father had it pulled out when we were kids, citing upkeep costs and childhood drowning statistics. “Besides,” he said at the time, “Roger and Lydia are happy to have you over there. You can use their pool whenever you want.”

It’s true Cade and I spent hours over there when we were little, jumping off the diving board and turning somersaults in the clear blue water. I try to imagine it now, showing up with Hannah and our bathing suits. We’re just here to have a swim. It might be worth it just to see the look on Lydia’s face.

“What?” he asks, going to work on the bell peppers. The pruners click neatly in his hand.

I snap to attention. “Hmm?”

“You’re smirking.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t even realized he was looking. Something tells me he wouldn’t be as amused by the mental image as I am. “I don’t mean to.”

I told my father I was pregnant and he didn’t speak to me for eleven weeks. I only blame him a little: His own parents died when he was seven, and he was, quite literally, raised by the nuns in Saint Tammany Parish in Louisiana. He fully intended to become a priest until he met my mother; he confesses every Friday and keeps a Saint Christopher medal tucked inside his shirt. In his heart he’s a musician but his soul is that of the most serious of altar boys, and the fact that he didn’t send me away to some convent until I had the baby is probably a testament to the mercy of the God that we’ve always prayed to in my house.

It got better once Hannah was born—better, I suspect, once I wasn’t so visibly, aggressively huge—and in the last year or so we’ve reached an uneasy kind of truce. Still, the anger he reserves for Sawyer is damn near bottomless, and it doesn’t surprise me that I’m going to catch the overflow now that my proverbial boyfriend is back.

Penance. Right.

“I was going to read out here for a while,” I say finally, for lack of anything better. I’m still clutching my textbook in one arm.

My father frowns. “It’s dark for that, Reena.”

Go away is what he means. I don’t know why I feel compelled to try. “It’s dark for aphid-picking, too,” I point out.

He sighs again, like I’m being difficult on purpose, like I’m deliberately missing the point. “Well,” he says after a moment, and when he finally turns to face me, it’s so quiet I can hear the neighbors’ sprinkler hissing endlessly next door. “I suppose you’re right.”

Before

“I suck,” was the first thing Allie said when I picked up the receiver, her number appearing on the caller ID for the first time in almost a week. I was sitting on my bed reading the travel magazines Soledad had picked up for me at the bookstore, imagining myself wandering the markets of Provence or sitting on the beach in a cove in Kauai. “I totally owe you a phone call.”

“You don’t suck,” I told her, although the truth is she sucked a little. It was the end of the summer. Sophomore year started in a few days. August had seeped away in a kind of weird, lonely fugue state: I’d played an awful lot of solitaire. I’d spent a lot of time alone. “You’re busy. I get it.”

“No, I do,” she argued. “I’m the worst. I miss you desperately. Come over. My parents have some law-firm benefit thing tonight. Come on,” she said, when I hesitated. “It’ll remind you how much you love me.”

I thought for one mean second about turning her down, claiming other plans and spending another night watching Law & Order reruns with Soledad, but in the end that was too bleak to contemplate, and besides: I missed her desperately, too.

“Yeah,” I said, after a minute. I got to the end of Travel + Leisure , flung its glossy pages onto the floor. “Of course.”

I biked the familiar streets that led to Allie’s parents’ development, everything green and rain-forest-damp. My tires skidded slickly against the blacktop. I leaned my bike against the side of the garage and scratched idly at a mosquito bite on the jut of my collarbone as I waited for Allie to open the door.

Lauren Werner opened it instead.

“Serena!” she said in a voice like a Fruit Roll-Up, tart and vaguely sticky, nothing organic there at all. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

I stared at her for a minute, her slinky top and honey-brown hair. “Yeah,” I said eventually. I was wearing stretched-out jeans rolled up into capri pants, a white Hanes undershirt that might have belonged to my brother at some point, and a pair of Birkenstock clogs. “Ditto.”

“Allie’s around here somewhere,” she told me, leading the way into the front hall like this was a place I’d never been before, like I’d need to be pointed in the direction of the bathroom and told where to hang up my imaginary coat. I followed dumbly. In the living room were half a dozen kids I recognized from the hallways at school, maybe a grade or two ahead of us—a girl from my chem class, a guy who worked the counter at Bump and Grind. I could see a couple more people hanging out in the kitchen: not a big party, definitely, but still, being there felt like being in a dream where you’re someplace you recognize but it looks weirdly different, everything just a degree or two off from true north. “I always forget you guys are friends.”

“Uh, yup,” I said vaguely, doing my best to ignore her garden-variety bitchiness and still trying to get my bearings. The AC wasn’t working, and the air in the hallway was tepid and aquarium-damp. “We’re friends.”

Just then Allie appeared, flushed and grinning, throwing her skinny arms around my neck. “Hi!” she said, and in that second she looked so happy to see me that I forgot myself and smiled back. That was the thing about Allie, one of the reasons I loved her so much: When she made you the object of all her terrifying, kinetic energy, it was like standing in a puddle of sun. “You’re here!”

“I’m here,” I said, letting her spin me around on the tile in a swooping little dance. “You know,” I said, once she’d dipped me and, deciding that was enough dancing for now, begun to yank me gently down the hall, “maybe you could have mentioned on the phone that half of school was going to be at your house so that I could have, you know, bathed.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning. “You look adorable.”

“I look twelve.”

“You look arty and cool.”

“Okay.” I snorted. “I do not look arty or cool —”