Katie Cotugno: How to Love

After

Shelby brings over a bottle of wine and a pint of ice cream on Friday, clomps up the stairs like a Clydesdale to help me pack. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” she asks again, refolding a pair of jeans and tucking them into the duffel bag on my bed. I am packing light. Hannah sits nearby, playing with her lamb and duck. “We’ll be like Thelma and Louise, only without the murder and fiery death.”

I laugh. “I would love for you to come with me,” I tell her, “but I need you to go back to school so you can make lots of money and support me in my decrepit old age.”

“And keep you in the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, I have my orders, then.” She sighs. “How I’m going to survive the rest of the summer without you, however, remains to be seen.”

“Oh, stop,” I say. “We’ll be meeting up in Boston before you know it. And until then you’ll be busy with Cara the hipster poli-comm major.”

Shelby makes a face like, Fair enough. “True,” she admits, smiling a secret sort of smile. “I do intend to be busy.”

I’m missing Shelby’s girlfriend’s visit by two days: We’re leaving tomorrow, Hannah and I, on a jaunt across the country in my crappy old car. It feels like pretend, but I’m dead serious this time: After all, you can’t be a travel writer if you’ve never been anywhere, and I’m done sitting here waiting for my real life to find me. I have a giant atlas, a dozen blank notebooks, and no real plan except to take my girl and go. I am terrified and thrilled.

Shelby flops onto the bed, lifting Hannah onto her chest and grinning. “Hey, girlie,” she says. She turns to me. “So everything is okay now? With your dad and Sol?”

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly.” I dig a couple of tank tops out of my dresser, toss them on the bed. “But better. I feel better about it. Good enough to go.”

“Well, thank God for that.” She makes a face. “About time. That’s what makes me crazy about you Catholics. You torture each other over stuff that was finished and done with during the Holy Roman Empire. Force everybody to repent and repent and repent, world without end, amen. Makes me nuts.”

I blink at her. “What did you just say?”

“I said it makes me nuts.”

I just stand there for a minute.

What have I been doing, if not exactly that?

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. That’s Peter. Peter, I always liked.

“Hey!” Shelby squints. “What?”

“Nothing.” I jump on the bed with my two best girls and give them both a good long snuggle. “Nothing at all.”

It’s just first light when I reach Sawyer’s house, dawn coming up gray and dripping behind me. I stopped at the gas station to fuel up and grab last-minute provisions; Hannah’s asleep in the car seat, put out by the early hour. The radio bumbles, a low, soothing sound.

I dig a couple of pebbles out of the planters in the LeGrandes’ front yard, then cut across the cluster of coconut palms on the lawn and toss them, one by one, at his window. Barely seven A.M. but it’s already humid, the slick of damp Florida air across my skin.

Nothing happens. I hold my breath: This is a stupid gesture, way lamer than it is poetic, but it made a weird kind of sense on the way over here. I’m just about to give up when Sawyer raises the screen and looks. “That for me?” he asks. Even from a full flight down, he’s got a hell of a smile.

I smile back, big and reflexive, and heft the enormous Slurpee in my free hand in a ninety-nine-cent salute. “Looks that way.”

Sawyer nods a little, sleepy and impressed. “It’s early,” is all he says.

“I know. I didn’t want to waste any time.” I hesitate, and then I say it: “I just stopped by to find out if you felt like taking a trip.”

Even from all the way down here I can see his dark eyebrows arc. “Where you going?” he asks, leaning a little further out the window, like he’s trying to get a good look at my face.

I shrug, raise my hands a little helplessly. “Not sure,” I admit, still grinning. It feels hugely powerful to say. “But I brought a lot of notebooks.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asks, faux-casual. “Gonna do some writing?”

“Thinking about it,” I tell him, equally glib. It feels like we’re circling something here, like maybe we both know where this is headed. Like maybe we sort of always have. “Gonna start in Seattle.”

Sawyer nods his approval. “Seattle is nice,” he says mildly. His tan fingers curve around the window frame. “When are you leaving?”

“Right now.”

Sawyer doesn’t say anything for a moment, then: “Wow.” He’s looking at me like he’s known me forever. He’s looking at me like I surprise him every day. He straightens up in the window, tall and familiar; the cup is damp and heavy in my hand. “I mean. Can you wait five minutes for me to put clothes on?”

I laugh out loud and sudden, like there’s something fizzing and effervescent inside my veins. I didn’t realize until right this second that I was holding my breath, but letting it out is hugely relieving, years and years’ worth of tension draining away. “I think so,” I say, still giggling— giggling , seriously, like I haven’t done in forever. Like Allie and I used to when we were little kids playing outside. “That sounds fine.”

“Good,” Sawyer says, and starts to tug the window down. “Stay put. I’ll be right there.”

“Okay,” I tell him, then: “Hey, Sawyer?”

He stops, peers back out at me. “Yeah? What’s up?”

I stand there. I gather my courage. I take a breath so deep it feels like it comes from the ground underneath my feet, and then I jump: “I love you, you know that?”

“I—” Sawyer breaks off, grinning hard and bright and happy. He looks like a little kid himself. “I do know that, actually,” he says after a moment. “But— Jesus , Reena.” He laughs a bit, disbelieving. “It’s nice to hear.”

It’s nice to say , I want to tell him, then realize I’ve got a whole country to say it. I’ve got a whole continent. I’ve got the whole world. The sun is rising, orange, a glowing circle in the sky.

“Come on,” I call, tilting my chin up. “I’m driving this time.”