Katie Cotugno - How to Love

“It’s just been a really difficult—” I stop. “You do?”

“I do.” There’s something stilted about his speech, like he’s been practicing. I wait. “You were right, Reena,” he begins after a moment, “about what you said at the table. I didn’t protect you after—” He breaks off, tries again. “Once the baby came. I was angry. You know that. I said rotten things to you, and I’m ashamed of myself for that. I’m sorry.” He swallows. “This isn’t the life I imagined for you.”

I shrug, hands still twisting in my lap. I tuck them between my knees to still them. “It’s not the life I imagined for me, either.”

“I know. But as your dad, I think it felt—it felt like a personal failure to me, to see you lose Northwestern. A baby at sixteen—it’s not the way I raised you. I’m sorry if that’s difficult for you to hear, but it’s true.”

My cheeks feel hot. “I know. ”

“But that’s not an excuse.” My father sighs again; he looks so old lately, his face gone slightly slack. “I did a terrible job once you told me you were pregnant. I did a miserable, piss-poor job. You probably needed your parents more than you’d ever needed your parents in your entire life, and what did I do? I walked away.”

I start to deny it, an absurd reflex. It’s bizarre to hear him talk this way. Finally I nod. “Yeah,” I tell him, which is about all I can manage. “It’s been hard.”

“But look at you,” he says. “You’ve handled yourself with a lot of grace. You’re responsible. You took up your cross. You do a good job with Hannah. You might think I don’t notice that, but I do.”

I feel my eyes start to well up, that familiar clog in my throat. I feel like I’ve been on the verge of crying for the last two years. “Thanks.”

“I know a lot of people have left you in your life,” he tells me, and that’s when the tears start for real. He gets a little closer, puts a heavy hand on my back. “Your mother, and Allie. Sawyer. And me, too.” His arm slides down around my shoulder, pulls me close; he smells like laundry detergent and limes. “But what I want to tell you, sweetheart, is that that’s not going to happen again, all right? I’m not going anywhere. No matter what happens, what you do or where you go—you’re not going to lose me again.”

Well, that rips it. All of a sudden it’s like he’s given me permission to let go of everything I’ve been holding on to so tightly—the guilt and fear I’ve walked around with since the night of his heart attack, the huge anger that’s burrowed in behind my ribs. I rest my head on his shoulder and let myself a cry a little, leave a wet splotch on his shirt the way I haven’t since I was a little girl. My father pets through my hair. I know this won’t fix everything between us—I know we have many, many miles to walk—but it feels, at the very least, like a start.

“There’s something else,” he tells me, once I’ve pulled it together a little bit, hiccups instead of sobs. His hand is still on my back, familiar after all this time. “It’s about Sawyer.”

“Honestly?” I groan. “There’s nothing going on between me and Sawyer.”

“It’s not that.” My father shakes his head. “Although whatever decision you make about him is just that—it’s your decision.” He clears his throat again, straightens up. “There’s something I never told you about Sawyer, about the time right before he left.”

I feel my eyebrows shoot up; I can only imagine. “What?”

My father reaches for the glass of water on the table, takes a long sip before he goes on. “He came here, to the house. Looking for you.”

“Wait,” I say, blinking. “Before he left for good?”

He nods. “This was when things between us weren’t so friendly, and I didn’t invite him in, but his car was full of all kinds of nonsense, like he was going on a trip.” He sets the water glass back down on the table. “I didn’t know then that he was leaving, but I also never told you he came by.”

I sit there for a minute, recalibrating. I feel like I’ve been hit with a wrecking ball. I think of Sawyer outside my house the other night, of him asking: If I’d asked you to come with me, would you have? I wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans. Maybe that’s not even what Sawyer wanted that day—maybe I’m understanding it wrong—but if there was a bunch of stuff in his car it means that the day I watched him pack up and leave the crummy stucco house forever, he came to say good-bye before he went.

“Well.” My father sits forward a bit, exhales like he’s sort of exhausted himself. “I just wanted to tell you, Reena, that I’m sorry that I’ve been so hard on you. I’ve sat in judgment, and that was a mistake. If there’s something—I’d like to try to make it up to you.”

I struggle for a moment, trying to fit all the pieces together—to come up with some cure-all, a plan for living our lives in a new way. I’m about to tell him to forget it, that both of us just need time—when all of a sudden it occurs to me, as clear and as terrifying as the Book of Revelation. “I need your blessing for something,” I tell him.

He hesitates for a moment: He thinks it’s Sawyer-related, I’m sure, but to his great credit, he comes through. “Name it.”

I raise my head, wipe my eyes, and stare at my father dead-on. “I’m going to take a trip.”

Before

Back at home after leaving Sawyer’s I shut the bedroom door and packed up all my guidebooks, threw my maps into the recycling. I ripped down my posters of Paris and Prague. I took the winter coat I’d gotten for Chicago—“I know it’s jumping the gun a little,” Soledad had said when she showed me the catalog, “but it’s good to be prepared”—and shoved it into my closet, deep in the back, past where Sawyer and I had fooled around the afternoon of Cade and Stef’s wedding. I imagined I could smell him, soapy and faint.

I had to take two breaks to throw up.

When I was finally done I sat in the middle of my bedroom floor for a while, looked around at my empty bookshelves and my naked walls. I leaned back and stared at the ceiling, two hands on my stomach. I cried for a while. I thought.

Eventually I wandered downstairs where Soledad was sweating onions, humming along to Dolly Parton under her breath. “Meat sauce,” she told me, instead of hello, then: “I didn’t know you were home.” She laid one cool hand on my cheek like she was checking for a fever, for something she sensed but couldn’t prove. “You feeling any better?”

I shrugged and then hugged her, impulsively and hard. She smelled clean and familiar, vanilla and home. “I’m okay,” I managed, breathing her in to try and keep it together. “I’m fine.”

“Well,” she said, kissing my temple. She sounded surprised, and it occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t let her hold me in a while. “Set the table, then.”

I stuck close to the house for a while after that, reading next to Soledad and shadowing my father in his garden, plucking tiny crimson strawberries from their vines. I wanted, a little bizarrely, to spend time with both of them while I still had the chance: I knew I was going to lose them anyway, sure as if I was moving clear across the world. I knew they were never going to look at me the same way again—and honestly wasn’t sure if I’d even want them to. Still, part of me missed them already, and I wanted to soak them up while I could.

So I pruned the tomatoes and helped Sol with dinner, got used to the way my life would be. I sat in the yard underneath the orange trees and tried to tell myself it could be enough, that I could be happy this way, that I wasn’t terrified and lonely, that the walls weren’t pressing in on all sides.