Katie Cotugno - How to Love

It’s not what he was hoping for; the sag of his body makes that much unmistakably clear. Still, Sawyer musters a smile. “Makes sense, I guess,” is all he tells me. Offers a hand to pull me to my feet.

Before

I dropped Sawyer at home after our miserable night in South Beach, drove back to my house, and beelined directly into the downstairs bathroom. I threw up everything I’d eaten all day.

Everything.

I sat on the tile for a long time after that, head against the wall, waiting for my stomach to settle, for my breath to stop coming so quick. I sobbed for a while, feeling pathetic. I thought my insides were actually in revolt. In the morning, Soledad brought me toast and tea and sat at the edge of the mattress reading novels in Spanish, thumb stroking absently along the arch of my foot while she listened to me try not to cry.

“What happened?” she asked once, around lunchtime. I shrugged into the pillows on the bed.

I felt better by dinner, thought of calling him, decided against it.

I sat awake in bed till the sun came up.

The morning after that, I got sick again. Then a day of nothing.

Then again the day after that.

(That was when I started to freak.)

I drove all the way to a Walgreens in Pompano Beach to buy a pregnancy test, went over to Shelby’s to take it. I curled my arms around my knees on the carpet-covered lid of the toilet. Shelby sat cross-legged on the floor.

“Just look at it for me, okay?” I told her, watching the second hand creep along the face of my watch—slowly, slowly. I couldn’t get over the notion that this absolutely could not be happening to me. I almost wasn’t even nervous, that’s how sure I was that it wasn’t real. We’d been careful, hadn’t we? I’d made sure we were careful. “Just … look.”

“I’m looking,” she said, peering at the stick and frowning. She was wearing denim cutoffs and a T-shirt with the Mario Bros. on it. “But it’s not—it’s not doing anything yet.”

“How is it not doing anything?” I demanded, leaning forward to grab it out of her hand. “It’s got to be—”

Shelby pulled it back, looked more closely; she glanced again at the picture on the back of the box. “ Reena ,” she said then, and she looked so sorry. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see.

After

There are complications following my father’s surgery, bleeding that requires a second operation. We spend a week’s worth of days and nights in that waiting room, Cade and Soledad and I, taking shifts, going home for showers, making dinners out of Diet Coke and Fritos from the vending machines. Shelby’s mom leaves casseroles on our doorstep. Lydia brings changes of clothes. Hannah comes down with a summer cold that keeps us up nights and turns me, for all intents and purposes, into an extra from a movie about the zombie apocalypse; Sawyer turns up at the hospital to take her off my hands for twenty-four hours, hands me a Tupperware container full of risotto I can tell he’s made himself.

“I owed you dinner,” he tells me, hitching the baby up on his hip.

“You owe me more than dinner,” I tell him, but there’s no real heat behind it. I grab his free hand, squeeze a little in spite of myself. “Thanks.”

Sawyer smiles. “You’re welcome.”

We don’t talk much, my family. Cade paces. I read magazines. Soledad prays. She’s stopped eating almost entirely; I think of Jesus in the desert, fighting his demons for forty days.

“About the thing,” she says suddenly, one night when I come to relieve her. She’s watching Leno with heavy-lidded eyes. “I shouldn’t have said that to you. I shouldn’t have told you to think. I know you think.”

“It’s fine.” I shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does, though.”

“Yeah,” I say eventually. “I guess it does.” I hold up a bag of takeout and think of how Cade and I used to beat the crap out of each other as kids and then move on a minute later as soon as something more important came up, like nothing had even happened. Maybe that’s just how families work. “I brought you food. Drive-thru was the only place open.”

“Thanks, sweetheart.” She sighs. “Sawyer has the baby?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“He doesn’t do a bad job with her,” she says. “I have to hand him that.”

I think of Seattle, of rainy woods and coffee on cloudy mornings. I think of the desert and hot, arid air. I think of the middle of this country, the endless rolling green of it, and I want so badly, badly, badly to get out of this place.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “You really do.”

On the way home the next morning, I stop by Target and pick up a road atlas of the continental United States.

Just to see.

Hannah and I are splitting a PBJ in the kitchen when the bell rings—not once, but five or six times in a row, incessant. I pad barefoot through the living room with the baby on my hip and fling it open: There’s Shelby on the other side of the door, wearing a Ms. Pac-Man T-shirt and a scowl, holding a big glass tray of marbled brownies. “I made these,” she says curtly, thrusting them at me. “Eat them or don’t.”

I reach my free hand out like a reflex, barely catching the tray before it crashes to the tiles. With everything that’s been going on around here, our paths haven’t crossed in a couple of weeks. “Thanks,” I tell her, a little shocked; then, trying for a smile: “Did you poison them?”

Shelby’s eyes narrow. “I should have,” she huffs. She squares her shoulders, muscles past me into the house. “I told you I wasn’t going to be shitty as long as you weren’t shitty,” she announces, flouncing onto the couch. “Well, you were shitty. But I’m gonna be cool.”

I blink, not totally understanding, resting the tray of brownies on top of the TV. “Really?”

“Yes, really.” She still looks annoyed, but she holds her arms out for the baby, waits for me to hand her over and cuddles her in the crook of her freckly arm. Hannah babbles her giddy pleasure—she loves Shelby, always has. Shelby traces her thumb over Hannah’s downy ear. “I feel like maybe you haven’t had a whole lot of breaks. So I’m giving you one.”

Right away I feel a lump rise up in my throat. My hands flutter sort of helplessly at my sides. “You always give me breaks,” I manage, voice cracking a little bit—and I don’t deserve her, I don’t, somebody as fierce as Shelby to help me fight my wars. “You’re my best friend.”

Shelby cocks her head to the side, wrinkles up the edges of her mouth like maybe she’s worried I’m going to get her started, too. “Oh, stop it,” she orders gruffly, but then: “You’re my best friend, too.”

Well, that does it. I’m crying for real when I sit down on the sofa, everything so painfully close to the surface all the time. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, almost too far gone to get the words out. “I didn’t mean to mess with your brother. I didn’t mean to screw everything up.”

Shelby slides an arm around my shoulders so she’s holding me and Hannah both. “I know,” she tells me, her ginger temple bumping softly against mine. “I’m sorry, too. I should have come over here right away, when your dad got sick. That was really shitty of me.”

“I thought you were going to hate me forever,” I tell her, and realize that it’s true: I thought for sure our friendship had gone the way of mine and Allie’s, that I’d lost her for good and would never be able to find a way back. I’m so hugely relieved that she’s here.