5
After
I wander downstairs once Hannah is in bed for the night, thinking I might do some school reading at the picnic table in the yard. It’s humid and swampy out, the air thick with mosquitoes, but frankly it’s not worse than any other night and I feel too big for these walls anyway.
I spend a lot of time out here in the evenings, tethered to the house with one ear out for the baby, feet up on a lounge chair and the odd lizard scurrying up the trunk of the orange tree. The damp air curls the pages of my books. I’ll do schoolwork or click around on Facebook, talk with Soledad if she’s feeling chatty. I used to try to write out here sometimes, before I finally gave up and stopped tormenting myself—the blank screen like a sweeping accusation from the person I used to be back in high school, everything I said I was going to do and didn’t.
Tonight my father’s beaten me out here, though, already hard at work in the garden he’s kept since Cade and I were babies, pulling the aphids off his tomato plants. He’s listening to Sarah Vaughan through the kitchen window. Soil is caked into the creases of his palms.
I almost turn around, just cut my losses and go—I’m still angry with him from earlier, absolutely, but that’s not the whole story, not by a long shot. I knew from the second I saw him that Sawyer turning up here was going to unearth all kinds of nastiness for my father, and just standing near him I’m hit with that familiar sear of frustration and shame. For a second I’m sixteen again, pregnant and hopeless, every careful plan for my future scattered like hayseed in a dry wind.
Still: That was before.
“How’s it going?” I venture, crossing the patio to be near him. The slate is warm under my feet.
My father glances up at me, then back at his tall, spindly plants. His doctor says gardening’s good for his heart, although that’s not why he does it. “All right, I suppose.” He sighs, rubs at a prickly green leaf with the pad of his thumb. “Worried about rot.” I watch as he moves on to the zucchini, the bright yellow summer squash. He’ll finish with Soledad’s rosebushes, just like always, pruning them back before they climb clear up the side of the house and take over like something out of a fairy tale.
We had an aboveground pool back here, once upon a time, but my father had it pulled out when we were kids, citing upkeep costs and childhood drowning statistics. “Besides,” he said at the time, “Roger and Lydia are happy to have you over there. You can use their pool whenever you want.”
It’s true Cade and I spent hours over there when we were little, jumping off the diving board and turning somersaults in the clear blue water. I try to imagine it now, showing up with Hannah and our bathing suits. We’re just here to have a swim. It might be worth it just to see the look on Lydia’s face.
“What?” he asks, going to work on the bell peppers. The pruners click neatly in his hand.
I snap to attention. “Hmm?”
“You’re smirking.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t even realized he was looking. Something tells me he wouldn’t be as amused by the mental image as I am. “I don’t mean to.”
I told my father I was pregnant and he didn’t speak to me for eleven weeks. I only blame him a little: His own parents died when he was seven, and he was, quite literally, raised by the nuns in Saint Tammany Parish in Louisiana. He fully intended to become a priest until he met my mother; he confesses every Friday and keeps a Saint Christopher medal tucked inside his shirt. In his heart he’s a musician but his soul is that of the most serious of altar boys, and the fact that he didn’t send me away to some convent until I had the baby is probably a testament to the mercy of the God that we’ve always prayed to in my house.
It got better once Hannah was born—better, I suspect, once I wasn’t so visibly, aggressively huge—and in the last year or so we’ve reached an uneasy kind of truce. Still, the anger he reserves for Sawyer is damn near bottomless, and it doesn’t surprise me that I’m going to catch the overflow now that my proverbial boyfriend is back.
Penance. Right.
“I was going to read out here for a while,” I say finally, for lack of anything better. I’m still clutching my textbook in one arm.
My father frowns. “It’s dark for that, Reena.”
Go away is what he means. I don’t know why I feel compelled to try. “It’s dark for aphid-picking, too,” I point out.
He sighs again, like I’m being difficult on purpose, like I’m deliberately missing the point. “Well,” he says after a moment, and when he finally turns to face me, it’s so quiet I can hear the neighbors’ sprinkler hissing endlessly next door. “I suppose you’re right.”