20
Before
“So,” Sawyer said out of nowhere, “did you ever finish your essay?”
“What?” I blinked at him. I was sitting at a back table, wrapping silverware into little white-cloth-napkin burritos, one leg tucked under me. It was almost Thanksgiving of junior year. Sawyer and I had edged around each other for weeks since the night on the piano bench, careful; I tracked his distant orbit from the corner of my eye. The restaurant rustled, steady, a current ferrying us through. “My essay?”
“The travel guide thing,” he elaborated. A gray undershirt peeked out from beneath the collar of his button-down. “For Northwestern.”
“Yeah, no, I know what you’re talking about.” I finished with the roll-ups, stacked the last of them into a wicker basket on the tabletop. “I just didn’t think you remembered that.”
“Well,” he said, shrugging, “I do.”
Imagine that. “It’s almost done,” I told him. In fact, I was halfway through my third draft of the stupid thing, sure there was something important I was leaving out. Ms. Bowen had looked at it, and so had my English teacher. Noelle, the snippy blond editor of the school paper, had read a copy and pronounced it satisfactory, which out of her mouth was actually a huge compliment—up to her standards, maybe. But not to mine. “Just fixing a few more things.”
“That’s cool. I still wanna see it.” He hesitated a minute, just standing there with his hands shoved in his pockets, watching me. “You got a break right now?” he asked. “I’m supposed to pick up some CDs from Animal.”
I felt my eyebrows rise. “Animal?”
“He’s my drummer.”
“Like in Muppet Babies?”
“Yeah, like in Muppet Babies.” Sawyer grinned. “Come on, come with me. We’ll stop and grab you a soda or something. Whatever the kids are drinking these days.”
“Absinthe, mostly,” I said, hesitating, not wanting to let on just how much I’d been hoping for an invitation like this one these past few weeks. Finally, taking a breath: “Sure, okay.” I stood up, untied my apron. “Just let me tell my dad I’m going.”
I poked my head into the cluttered office my father shared with Roger, papers stacked on the desktop and photos of both our families on the walls. “Can I take my break?” I asked. “It’s, like, super slow.”
He looked at me over the top of his computer monitor, reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. “Sure. Where you going?”
“Thanks,” I said, then, quickly: “I’m going to run some errands with Sawyer.”
“With Sawyer?” His eyebrows shot up so fast, I thought they might be in danger of springing off his head entirely.
“Yes.”
“All right,” he said, hesitating, a look on his face like maybe he wished there was a valid reason for him to say no. “Be careful.”
“Will do.”
“Did you lie this time?” Sawyer asked when I returned. He was holding my shoulder bag in one hand and his car keys in the other, leaning against the bar.
“No,” I told him, sort of surprised that he remembered. “I told the truth.”
This time of day there wasn’t a ton of traffic near the restaurant, just crappy antiques shops and cracked pavement. The engine hummed behind my knees. Sawyer flicked the button on the stereo, and the CD in the player clicked to life: Miles Davis, I recognized after a moment. Bitches Brew.
“I really like the stuff he did right before this,” I said, nodding at the radio as Sawyer glanced over his shoulder and merged. “Kind of Blue and all that. I mean, I know everybody really likes this album, it’s good, but if you ever see pictures of him from around this time they’re just so awful and sad. He’s dressed like Tina Turner all the time.”
Sawyer laughed. “Listen to you. I didn’t know you were into this stuff.”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I’m into it, exactly. But you don’t live in my house for sixteen years without picking some of it up.”
“I guess not,” he said. “Anyway, my iPod’s floating around here someplace. Put on whatever you want.”
I nodded and looked around until I found it, settled on some old Solomon Burke. “Good?” I asked after a moment, as the horns started up.
“This works.” Sawyer was grinning. He tapped his fingers on the underside of the steering wheel as he drove. “Your dad introduced me to all this stuff, you know that? When he used to give me lessons.”
“I remember.” I used to sit in the kitchen and listen. “He was really bummed when Cade and I turned out to be tone-deaf.” I smiled. “Just one more in a long line of parental disappointments, I guess.”
“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.”