It sounds nasty and composed, and for one second my mighty magician Sawyer looks so helpless, so completely sorry, that it almost breaks my heart all over again. “Don’t do that,” I order quietly. “It’s not fair.”
“I’m not,” he says, shaking his head, recovering. “I’m not.”
I roll my eyes. “Sawyer, just—”
“You look really good, Reena.”
Just like that he’s back to taming lions; this whole thing is so surreal I almost smile. “Shut up,” I tell him, trying to mean it.
“What? You do.” As if he’s got some sixth sense for nearly breaking me, Sawyer grins. “Am I going to see you around?”
“Are you going to be around?”
“Yeah.” Sawyer nods. “I think so.”
“Well.” I shrug like somebody whose hands aren’t shaking, whose throat hasn’t closed like a fist. I only just finally got used to him being gone. “I live here.”
“I want to meet that baby of yours.”
“I mean, she lives here, too.” I’m aware that there are other people in this aisle, normal convenience-store shoppers whose worlds haven’t taken a sharp and unexpected curve this fine morning. One of them nudges me out of the way to get to the Cheetos. Outside it’s still pouring like crazy, like maybe the end of the world is at hand. I breathe out as steadily as I can manage. “Bye, Sawyer.”
“See you, Reena,” he tells me, and if I didn’t know better I’d think it was a promise.
2
Before
“Gin,” Allie said triumphantly, dropping her last card onto my quilted bedspread and raising her sharp chin in victory. “You’re finished.”
“Ugh. Seriously?” I flopped back onto the pillows, dropped my feet into her lap. We’d spent most of the afternoon mired in a ridiculously complicated version of rummy governed by a rigid and intricate roster of house rules we’d never been able to explain to anyone else—which didn’t actually matter, seeing as how the only people we ever played with were each other. “I quit.”
“It’s not quitting if you already lost,” she said, reaching over to my dresser and scrolling through the music on my laptop. The sunny pop she liked best chorused from the tinny speakers. “At that point it’s just … conceding.”
I laughed and kicked at her a bit, just gently. “Jerk.”
“You are.”
“Your mom is.”
We hung out in silence for a little while, comfortable and familiar. Allie picked idly at a fray in the hem of my jeans. On the wall was a poster of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, another of Paris at dusk—both speckled with little grease spots in the corners from the tacky stuff I’d used to position and reposition them until they were just exactly right. It was the spring of our freshman year, almost summer; the world felt endless and impossibly small.
“Hey, girls?” My stepmother, Soledad, appeared in the doorway, dark hair knotted neatly on top of her head. “Roger and Lyd’ll be here any minute,” she said to me. “Can you come down and set the table for me? Allie, honey,” she continued, not bothering to wait for my reply—I’d say yes, obviously. I always said yes. “Do you want to stay for dinner?”
Allie frowned, glancing at the alarm clock on my night-stand. “I should probably get home,” she said, sighing. She’d gotten busted for shoplifting again a couple of weeks before, a pair of plastic sunglasses and a silky scarf from the Gap this time, and her parents were keeping her on a pretty tight leash. “Thanks, though.”
“Okay.” Soledad smiled and tapped the doorjamb twice before she turned around, the delicate metal of her wedding ring clicking against the paint. “Make sure you set an extra place, Serena, will you?” she called over her shoulder. “Sawyer’s coming tonight, too, I think.”
Right away Allie and I looked at each other, eyes going wide. “I can stay,” she announced immediately, bolting upright like a prairie dog. “I’ll call my … uh. Yeah. I can definitely stay.”
I laughed so hard I almost fell right off the bed, thinking even as I tried to pull it together that I was going to need to put on some makeup. “You are so obvious,” I said, heaving myself up and onto the carpet, heading for the hallway as casually as somebody whose heart wasn’t jackhammering inside her chest. “Come on, nerd. You can fold the napkins.”
*
Lydia LeGrande blew into the kitchen like a tropical storm twenty minutes later, all confidence and chunky necklaces, dropping a cursory kiss on my cheek. “How you doing, Reena?” she asked, not waiting for me to answer before setting a tray of fancy cheese on the counter and peeling the plastic wrap away. Roger followed with a bottle of wine, navigating his considerable bulk with surprising deftness, and put a hand at my upper back to say hello. “Hiya, chickie,” he said.
The LeGrandes were my father and Soledad’s closest friends, partners both in the restaurant where we all worked and for vacations down to the Keys, outdoor concerts at Holiday Park. Their games of Outburst were loud and legendary. Lydia had gone to college with my mom. She and Roger had introduced my mother and father to begin with, and when my mother died of complications from multiple sclerosis when I was four and my father was too busy raging at God to think about things like lunches and clean socks, Lydia was the one who hired Soledad to move in with us, not realizing at the time that she’d found him a second wife just like she’d found him a first. A little over a decade later and they still came for dinner often—but not, for the most part, with their son.