17
After
“It’s not a date,” I promise Soledad the next morning, when she asks for the particulars of my playground trip with Sawyer and Hannah. She’s sitting at the table drinking her favorite chai latte from an old Northwestern mug she ordered a million years ago, her tawny skin smooth and makeup-free. I really, really hate that mug. “He just wants to spend a little time with Hannah, so I said he could.” I tickle Hannah’s feet in her high chair, and she giggles. “Kiss, please,” I demand, then wait for her to plant one on me before I turn back to Sol. “I actually think it’s very adult behavior on my part.”
Soledad eyes me over her latte like she thinks perhaps the lady doth protest too much. “I hear you and Hannah have a very busy social calendar,” is all she says.
“Oh, you’re hilarious.” I scowl.
Now it’s three thirty and 89 degrees out, and Sawyer and I are pushing Hannah in the baby swings on the playground outside the elementary school, asphalt warm and sticky under our feet. My car is still at the mechanic’s and Sawyer picked me up at the house, just like he used to; Count Basie was on the stereo and I had to concentrate hard on looking out the window, on not breaking to smithereens right there in the front seat. I don’t remember why I agreed to this. It didn’t even seem like a good idea at the time.
“So what made you change your mind?” he wants to know now. He’s dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead, and I’m shocked to realize that he looks not like a rock star or a runaway boyfriend, but like a dad. He’s got another Slurpee and he brought me one, too, Coke-flavored and freezing, sweating pleasantly in my hand.
I raise my eyebrows, make him work. “About?”
“I don’t know,” he says, taking over as I step away from the swing set. We’ve been trading back-and-forth for nearly half an hour, steady like a metronome. Hannah could swing for days, chubby baby legs kicking happily; she figured out clapping a few months ago, and every once in a while she smacks her hands together with some kind of secret baby glee. “This. Me.”
I shake my head. “I haven’t changed my mind about you.”
Sawyer snorts. “Ouch.”
“Sawyer—” I break off, huffing a little. “I’m trying, you know?”
“I know,” he says.
We push in silence, patient. The sun glares. My lungs ache like they’re full of dust, dry and barren. “What was the best place you visited?” I ask finally, not so much because I want to know—it’s almost safer not to, I think—but because I can’t imagine what else to ask him and the quiet shreds my nerves. There’s a map of the United States stenciled in bright paint on the blacktop. I wonder if small things like that will ever stop making me sad about everything I missed out on. “What was your favorite?”
Sawyer glances at me once, like he’s surprised, and then thinks a moment. “Nashville,” he decides eventually. “You would really like Nashville.”
I hum a little, noncommittal. “Would I.”
“Yeah, Reena,” he tells me. “I think you would.”
“Out,” Hannah says, quite clearly, and Sawyer grins.
“Out?” he repeats.
“Out!”
“Okay, then. Out it is.” He lifts her from the swing and sets her on the ground; she toddles happily toward the sandbox, quick and unsteady. “My mom says it’s been good for her,” he tells me. “Hannah, I mean, having all her grandparents around, and you, and—” He smiles, a little shyly. “She says she’s really smart.”
Well, that gets my attention. “Your mom said that?” I ask, disbelieving—Hannah’s smart all right, but if it has anything to do with the keen interest shown by her grandparents, then I’m the Cardinal of Rome. “Seriously?”
“Uh, yeah.” Sawyer looks suddenly uncomfortable, like he thinks he’s possibly misstepped—it’s not an expression I remember from back when we were together, him so sure of himself all the time. “Why, is that not … ?”
It boggles me a little, though not as much as you’d think. Lydia’s probably pulling out every stop she can think of to get Sawyer to stick around this time, and if that means convincing him that everybody gets along great around these parts, that we’re all some kind of modern, blended family—well, then, so be it. Still, for some reason I don’t have it in me to give her away, not explicitly: It feels like a lot of work for nothing, on top of which it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that there’s some small part of me hoping it will work and he’ll stay.
I shrug. “No, she’s definitely something,” I say, not bothering to qualify which she I might be referring to or what that something might possibly be. I nod at Hannah, who’s calling my name from the edge of the sandbox. “Here I come, babycakes!”
Sawyer looks at me like he’s not totally buying what I’m selling; he doesn’t push me on it, though, like maybe we’ve got some tacit agreement to play nice with each other on this hot, sunny afternoon. “So, hey,” he says instead, as we follow Hannah on a scenic tour of the playground, sun bleaching white on the back of her neck. She squats down to grab a handful of sand and almost loses her balance, and I reach out a steadying hand. “Are you still writing?”
I laugh before I can stop it, a low angry cackle like the Wicked Witch of the West. I try not to feel bitter. It doesn’t always work. “No,” I tell him. “No, not really.”
Sawyer frowns. “That’s too bad.”
“It’s fine,” I say, hoping he’ll drop it, but:
“Why’d you stop?”
“Because.” I shrug and dig some sunscreen out of my bag for the baby. It’s possible this isn’t even the real answer, but at the moment it’s the best I can do. “You can’t be a travel writer if you’ve never gone anywhere.”
Sawyer takes some time to absorb that. With the hat, it’s kind of hard to see his face. “Fair enough,” he says after a minute, and he doesn’t ask me any questions after that. Instead he looks at the swing set, at the baseball diamond, at Hannah. He squats down in the sand and digs in.
*
We get home and my father is fixing himself a snack in the kitchen, leftover chicken and rice from the other night, skinless and low-fat like Soledad always makes for him. The radio croons, the public jazz station out of Miami that he likes. “Hi,” I say, putting Hannah in her chair and pushing her sweat-dampened hair off her face. I collect a few stray Cheerios from this morning, toss them into the sink.
My father nods at me, impassive. His cholesterol and blood pressure medications are lined up along the counter. In the last year or so he’s put on weight.
“We were at the park,” I tell him.
“So I heard.” He nods again.
“With Sawyer,” I continue.
“So I heard.” Mother of God, he nods a third time.
Oh, come off it, I almost snap. Instead I take a deep breath, steadying. “All right,” I say, surrendering. With the possible exception of Soledad, we’re none of us emoters in my family. Still, my father can out-silence anybody, even me. “Can we just … address the fact that this is happening?”
“What’s that?”
That makes me mad. “You know what,” I say, an edge in my voice I can’t totally file down. “Him being here. Any of it.”
My father sighs. “Reena, I don’t really see that there’s anything to talk about. You know how I feel. You make your own choices. Do what you want.” This morning’s paper sits on the table, and he opens it to the international news. “There’s food,” he says, without looking up.
“Okay,” I say finally, and open the refrigerator. “Just … okay.”
Not so long ago, in my art class we read about the Renaissance and how for a long time afterward it was almost impossible for Italian artists to make anything. All that history there already, they figured. What was the point?