3
After
“Sawyer LeGrande is home?”
I’m livid when I stomp into the house a full two hours ahead of schedule, back from the 7-Eleven and banging my way into the kitchen with all the grace and equanimity of a hand grenade. I’ve been driving in panicky circles through the still-biblical downpour like if I don’t keep moving something bad is going to happen, like chance favors those in motion and the odds are already stacked. Outside, the palm trees bend in supplication. My car stalled at three different lights.
“What?” Soledad snaps to attention. She’s been chopping carrots at the counter and the knife clatters into the basin; she swears softly in Spanish before jerking her thumb to her mouth. Hannah, who’s sitting in her high chair macerating a gritty-skinned tomato from my father’s garden, begins to shriek. She’s small and dark-haired and fierce, my girl; when she really puts her mind to it, her howl can seem to come from a creature ten times her size. “Mama,” she wails, that last long a like the universe has totally wronged her. I tuck her against the curve of my body and begin to pace like some nervous feline, a lioness or lynx.
“It’s okay,” I lie, whispering nonsense until she quiets, watery pulp slipping through her chubby fists. “That was scary. I know. It’s okay.” I look back at my stepmother, who’s still sucking the blood from her finger and staring at me in disbelief. “Sawyer LeGrande,” I repeat, like maybe there’s possibly some other Sawyer she thinks I’m talking about. “Hanging out by the Slurpees.”
Soledad takes a moment to process that information, then: “What flavor?”
I blink at her. “What flavor?”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“Watch it,” she reminds me, and I look guiltily at Hannah. Already my kid is toddling and full of jabber, gobbling the universe with a terrific kind of greed, and I know it’s only a matter of time before she gets to preschool and starts asking her teacher why today’s snack is so shitty.
“Sorry,” I mutter, planting a kiss against her warm, downy head as she smashes a little bit of tomato into my face. “Your mom is a trash mouth.”
“Did you skip your class?” Soledad asks, and I’m about to tell her exactly where community college falls on my list of priorities in this particular moment when my brother lets himself in through the back door, my father close behind him. There was a managers’ meeting at the restaurant this afternoon, I remember all of a sudden.
“Ladies.” Cade glances at me briefly, heads directly for the fridge. He was a fullback on our high school’s football team, once upon a time, and he still eats like he’s bulking up for a game. “Saw Aaron at the gym this morning.”
I ignore him—and the reference to my boyfriend—as if I haven’t even heard. “Did you know Sawyer is home?” I ask instead. I don’t mean to sound as crazy as I do, so close to hysterical; I take a deep breath, bounce Hannah on my hip, and try to contain the overflow. “Did you?”
“No,” Cade says immediately, but suddenly he won’t look at me and the back of my neck is prickling. He frowns at the contents of the refrigerator, like there’s something really interesting going on in there. “Did you drink all the OJ?” he asks.
“Kincade, I am going to ask you again—”
“What?” He sounds pissed at me now, irritated. “I didn’t know, exactly—”
“Cade!”
“Reena.” My father steps between us like we’re seven and twelve instead of eighteen and twenty-three, like maybe I’m about to pull some bratty little-sister move involving a shin-kick or a punch to the back of the head. Like maybe I’m not standing here holding a child of my own. “Enough,” he says, and I turn on him. My father and Sawyer’s have been friends since they were children; they’ve owned the restaurant for more than a decade, are godfathers to each other’s sons. There is no way in the breathing world that if Sawyer LeGrande so much as crossed the state line into Florida, my father didn’t hear about it.
“What about you?” I demand, trying to keep my voice steady. His hair is going gray at the temples. Hannah squirms unhappily in my arms. “You must have known.”
My father nods. “Yes,” he says, and looks at me evenly. One thing he never does is lie.
“And you didn’t tell me?”
He doesn’t reply for a minute, like he’s thinking. Dark spots from the rainstorm are flecked across his shirt. “No,” he says, when he’s ready. “I didn’t.”
None of this is new information, but still it hits like something with physical force, a pillowcase full of nickels or God sending a flood for forty days. “Why not?” I ask, and it comes out a lot sadder than I mean it to.
“Reena—”
“Soledad, please.”
“I didn’t tell you he was here,” my father says slowly, and he is the very theology of calm, “because I was hoping he wasn’t going to stay.”
Well.
All three of them are looking at me, waiting. Soledad’s got a hand pressed to her heart. Cade is still standing at the refrigerator, all bulk and muscle, watchful.
“OJ’s in the door,” I tell him finally, and take Hannah upstairs for her nap.