Free How to Love by Katie Cotugno

thanks. Hey, pretty lady,” I say, scooping Hannah up from where she’s playing on the floor and planting noisy raspberries on her tummy until she’s giggling like gangbusters, squirming happily in my arms. “How was your day, huh? You have fun today?”
    “She was a dream,” Soledad reports, same thing she says every time she watches Hannah. They spend a lot of time together, and I like the idea of her as a second mom to Hannah, just like she was to me. Soledad lived with our family for nearly a decade before my father asked her to marry him, another piece of this family clicking quietly into place.
It is not good for man to be alone.
    “Where is he?” I ask her now, toeing off my sneakers and hefting Hannah onto my hip. My dad has been avoiding me since our run-in at the tomato plants, studiously absent whenever I’m around. The baby chatters happily into my ear.
    “In the yard again. Reena …” Soledad looks sorry. Sometimes her voice reminds me of water over a fire, the steam rushing up like that. “You might want to give him some time.”
    “Oh.” I nod. I’m not entirely sure what she’s worried about, his temper or his heart. Both, most likely: When I used the computer this morning I saw her recent Google search for the effects of stress on cardiac conditions. “Okay. You know, I was thinking of taking the baby for a ride.”
    “We’re supposed to meet Roger and Lyd in a little bit anyway,” Soledad tells me. “Gonna check out that new place on Las Olas.” She looks like she wants to say something else, and for a moment I almost ask her how it’s possible that my father can eat a friendly dinner with Sawyer’s parents, size up the culinary competition, but can’t find it in his heart to look at me. In the end, though, both of us let it lie. “Have a good time,” is all she says.
    “We will. Come on, you,” I tell the baby, and bring her upstairs for a change before we go. “We’re road trippin’.”
    *
    Hannah had wicked colic when she was an infant; she didn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time until she wasnearly six months old. Changing her feeding schedule didn’t work. Laying her down on the dryer didn’t work. Backrubs didn’t work, and neither did long soaks in the baby tub. Soledad helped as much as she could, but in the end it was Hannah and me sitting on the floor and crying, two men trapped in a mine. I honestly had no idea what to do.
    She did like driving, though, and if I wasn’t too exhausted to get behind the wheel of a car, it usually wasn’t too long before she’d pass out in the backseat—head lolled back, tiny fist shoved in her mouth. Still, for the first hour or so the slightest stop would wake her, so I took to driving for miles on the interstate, where there was no threat of red lights or pedestrians to slow us down. Once, I ran out of gas in Miami and had to call Cade to come get us. Another night I made it all the way to Vero before I realized it was probably time to head home.
    Eventually, Hannah’s bellyaches subsided and our moonlight excursions up and down 95 became less and less frequent. I haven’t driven this stretch of highway in months. But tonight, as the baby drifts off to dreamland to the dependable droning of public-radio jazz, the scene out the windows is as familiar as home.

12
Before
    Sawyer didn’t say a word as he sped away from the ice cream shop and toward the hospital, went quiet as nighttime and just as still. A gorge had opened up inside my chest. The CD in the stereo was still spinning, old Louis Armstrong Sawyer must have gotten from my dad, and I reached forward and clicked it off. “It’s bad, right?” I asked.
    Sawyer shrugged once, eyes on the asphalt in front of him. “I don’t know.”
    “It must be bad, right? If she’s already in surgery and my dad wouldn’t—” I broke off, the words swallowed up by guilt and confusion and this huge, endless fear. I dug my fingernails into the passenger seat,