“I don’t know about that.” He shook his head. “You guys are, like, the perfect children. Everybody knows how proud he is of you.”
I pulled one leg up onto the seat as we turned a corner, rested my chin on my knee. “Well, your dad is—”
Sawyer cut me off. “What if we don’t talk about my dad?”
“He’s proud of you,” I protested.
“He’s a dick.” Sawyer hit the brakes like punctuation, no arguments, and it occurred to me that for all our years and years of proximity, maybe I didn’t actually know what it was like to be a LeGrande.
“This is it,” he said a moment later, unbuckling his seat belt and scrubbing a hand through his wavy hair. We were sitting in front of a little gray bungalow in dire need of a guest spot on a home improvement show: The porch sagged, one of the front windows was cracked, and the lawn was all but dead. Soledad would have had an aneurysm just looking at it, and I was pretty sure Lydia LeGrande wouldn’t have been particularly impressed, either. “You wanna just wait here?”
“Oh,” I said. I wondered briefly which one of us embarrassed him, Animal or me, or if maybe I’d just pushed him too far again. “Yeah, sure.”
“The house is pretty grody,” Sawyer said by way of explanation, shaking his head. “It’s a bunch of guys that live here, so … I don’t know, I don’t want to, like, appall you or anything.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll be here.”
I leaned my head back to listen to the music and, to my credit, managed to wait until about thirty seconds after he had disappeared inside the house—the front door was unlocked, and he strolled right in—before conducting a more thorough investigation of the contents of the Jeep. I twisted around to have a look at the backseat: A faded blue sweatshirt and an old issue of Rolling Stone were crumpled together on the floor, but other than that, he’d cleaned up. Allie’s mix CD was gone. A couple of bar tabs sat beneath some coins in the well between the two front seats, and—oh God, that’s what you get for being so nosy—there were two condoms tucked in the compartment where you’re supposed to keep your toll money. I could feel myself blushing, even though there was no one else in the Jeep. Jesus. Shelby would get a kick out of that one, I knew.
“Hey,” Sawyer said, and I jumped as he opened the door. “Ready to go?”
“Sure. Where are the CDs?”
“CDs?” He looked at me blankly.
“Yeah,” I said. “You said you were getting—”
“Oh, right, right.” Sawyer nodded. “He didn’t have them.”
“Oh.” He was lying, clearly. I thought of bar fights and shady characters, wondered what kind of run I’d just taken part in.
“He’s sort of a space case,” he continued as we pulled out onto the main road. “Animal, I mean. His real name is Peter. But you can’t be in a rock-and-roll band with a name like Peter.”
“Sure you can,” I countered. “What about Pete Townshend?”
“Okay, well—”
“Pete Seeger.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Peter, Paul and Mary.”
“Peter, Paul and Mary were not a rock-and-roll band!”
“But they sang about drugs.” I was enjoying myself. “So if your argument is that people named Peter are too uptight for drug-type singing, then Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary clearly illustrates otherwise.”
“You know, I think I liked you better when you didn’t talk.” Sawyer was laughing. “You want a milkshake or something? Baskin-Robbins is on the way back.”
“Nah. Just a soda is fine.”
“Your call,” he said, switching lanes and executing a particularly skilled parallel park outside a Chinese grocery on A1A. I hopped out onto the sidewalk, the sun warm and reassuring on my skin.
“Oh!” I said happily, once we were inside. Sunrise Grocery was just a glorified convenience store, but there was always some kind of unusual produce stacked on the stand near the door—I’d written a column about it for the paper, actually, and something called an Ugli fruit. “They have pomegranates.”
“Pomegranates?” Sawyer tossed a pack of gum on the counter and began rooting around in his back pocket for his wallet. “You want one?”
I paused, retrieved a bottle of Coke from the refrigerated case near the door. “Yes, actually.”
Sawyer laughed. “So get one. Get me one, too, actually. I’ve never had one before.”
“You’ve never had a pomegranate?” I asked, setting the pair of softball-size fruits on the counter.
“Nope.”
“And you’ve lived here your whole life?”
“Longer than you, even.”
“That makes me feel sad for you.”
“Cue the violins,” he agreed. He dropped his change into the “leave a penny” basket and handed me the plastic bag. “Here,” he said. “Peace offering.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Are we fighting?”
“I don’t know,” he said, holding the door open. We crossed the sidewalk to the Jeep and climbed inside. “You tell me.”
I thought about it for a second, about the night in the restaurant and how he’d totally shut down on me as soon as I said Allie’s name. “No,” I said after a minute. I reached into the grocery bag and fumbled around until I produced one fat pomegranate. “I think we’re good.” Then, taking a deep breath and cracking it open with my thumbnails: “Do you miss her?”