Chapter 5 #2
“Yeah,” I called out from behind the now-closed door, dropping my head back and staring at the ceiling. “Sorry, man,” I said, “but I’ve got to get home.”
“Ask your mom if you can crash at my place.”
So I asked, and to my surprise, she said yes—half asleep, probably, and not in the mood to argue. I waited downstairs until Tommy reappeared, hair a little tousled, grin sheepish.
He tossed me the keys. “You drive. I’ve had a little too much.”
I slid under the wheel, excited to be driving something other than my mom’s Chevrolet station wagon.
Tommy gave me directions to his house as I drove.
With the top down, the night air was cooler than earlier, but it still felt great, and I remember thinking as we rolled down the two-lane country road that it was damn great to be young and alive and able to go out on a Saturday night with a friend.
I’d never been to Tommy’s house by road.
I’d seen it from the water, but it was a beautiful old place, the house handed down from his grandfather.
He had told me one afternoon that his parents had renovated it, and that he secretly liked all the new creature comforts over the version his mother had lovingly referred to as stepping back in time.
Whatever it was called, I’d known when we stepped inside the foyer that night it was, indeed, a home.
There was the lingering smell of baking in the air, something like chocolate chip cookies or banana bread.
My stomach had rumbled, and I remembered not eating dinner that night.
My mom had been home from work when I left, and the refrigerator empty except for a couple slices of hardened American cheese and a bottle of mustard.
Tommy made straight for the kitchen, waving for me to follow, even as he gave me the “Shh” sign so we wouldn’t wake up his family. The lights were off, and he flipped on the switch as we walked into the room.
A pretty girl sat on the barstool at the counter, her plate filled with what looked like a half-eaten slice of apple pie, a dollop of vanilla ice cream melting down the sides.
“Hey, sis,” Tommy said, making a beeline for the refrigerator. “What are you doing up?”
“Waiting for you,” she said, taking another bite of her pie.
“Told you I’d be late,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
“Jake, this is Sawyer, my sassy baby sister. Sawyer, Jake.”
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” she said back. “And I’m not a baby.”
Tommy had already told me that his sister was fifteen, but if I hadn’t known that, I would have guessed she was older.
She was mature for her age, both in posture and looks, and I found myself glancing away and not meeting eyes with her, the same way I did when the popular girls in high school tried to talk to me at lunch.
“Where’d y’all go?” she asked.
“To a party,” Tommy said, pulling stuff from the well-stocked refrigerator and placing it on the island countertop across from Sawyer.
“You want a sandwich, Jake?” Tommy asked.
“Yeah,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound too eager.
He opened a drawer, pulled out two knives, and handed me one. “Make yourself at home,” he said. “I’m having turkey and cheese. There’s some other stuff here, so just make what you like.”
“Thanks,” I said, appreciating again Tommy’s easygoing generosity.
I felt awkward and clumsy with Sawyer watching.
But I was too hungry to concede to vanity, so I continued on following Tommy’s lead until I’d built myself a towering sandwich that had to be cut into quarters so I could eat it.
Tommy dug into his, and I followed suit.
Neither of us said anything until we had finished half.
“Whose party?” Sawyer asked.
“Bethany’s.”
“Bethany’s,” she repeated.
“What?” Tommy said. “You don’t even know her.”
“I don’t have to,” Sawyer said, taking another bite of her pie. “How many Bethanys have you known?”
“A few,” Tommy conceded with a smile.
“That’s an understatement,” she said. And then looking at me directly, “Do you like girls like Bethany, Jake?”
Any response I could think of stuck in my throat. I was older and supposedly more mature and should be able to navigate my way through a conversation with Tommy’s younger sister. But there was something about her that made me tongue-tied to say the least, and I shrugged.
“No?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered, wiping my mouth with a paper napkin Tommy pulled from a drawer. “I guess I wonder what do you mean by girls like Bethany?”
“Girls who don’t exactly play hard to get,” she said without hesitating.
Tommy laughed. “Sawyer, what do you know about it? Have you been reading Mom’s romance novels again?”
“Shut up, Tommy,” she said, half smiling.
“Well, believe me,” Tommy said. “It doesn’t happen in real life like it happens in those books.”
Sawyer rolled her eyes. “So how does it happen?”
I sat there and watched the exchange between the two, admittedly envious.
They teased each other, but the love between them was clear, even to me when I’d barely been around them long enough to know.
I knew how it was between me and my brother and the fact that I had been a nuisance to him.
What would it be like to have a sibling who had your back, who cared if you messed up or made mistakes?
Who tried to set a good example for you.
“There are plenty of girls who like you, Tommy, that aren’t like Bethany.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, sis, right now, I’m perfectly fine with the Bethanys of the world.”
“You better not get her pregnant. Daddy will kill you.”
“Sawyer!” Tommy said, looking up and shooting her a look of disapproval. “Where the heck did that come from?”
“I saw the condoms in your nightstand drawer,” she said, back to eating her pie with deliberation.
“What were you doing in my nightstand drawer?”
“I was looking for a pen, but found something other than that, obviously.”
“Well then,” he said, “at least you know I have no intention of getting anyone pregnant.”
“If you’re old enough to be having sex,” she said, “then I guess you’re old enough to know they’re not foolproof.”
“Yes, Mom,” he said. “I am aware they’re not foolproof.”
Tommy looked at me then. “Do you have brothers and sisters, Jake, that give you grief like this?”
I shook my head. “I have a brother. But he doesn’t care what I do.”
“Lucky you,” Tommy said. But that was where I had to disagree with him. I didn’t think it made me lucky at all.
*
AFTER THAT NIGHT, Sawyer started showing up at the dock when Tommy and I were working, riding a family Sea-Doo over.
At first, she had some reason for being there.
She’d come by to get some food from the snack bar, fill up the Sea-Doo with gas, and then when she seemed to run out of new excuses, she started hanging out and watching while we filled boats with gas, sipping on a Dr. Pepper from the snack bar fountain.
Tommy was usually busy talking to whichever girl happened to be hitting on him at the moment, and so Sawyer began talking to me.
At some point, it started to become obvious that she was coming to see me and not Tommy.
I’d been flattered by this even though Sawyer was two years younger.
She was pretty. Really pretty. And I had the impression that this was something she hadn’t been aware of until recently.
I didn’t know whether she had reached this conclusion on her own or if she’d picked up on my reluctant attraction. And it was that. Reluctant. Very.
I clearly understood the age difference between us, as well as the value of my friendship with Tommy, and there was no way I was going to do anything to cross either one of those lines, but Sawyer was just easy to talk to.
She seemed to be interested in my answers to the questions she asked of me: What did I want to do when I got out of high school?
What was the best book I’d ever read? Did I think it was a bad thing for football players to get concussions on a regular basis?
Did I think people needed to eat meat in order to be healthy?
That was the question she’d asked me one hot July afternoon when Tommy was again flirting with a girl from North Carolina there for the week with her family.
Sawyer was sitting on the edge of the dock, just down from the gas pump I was in charge of manning.
She dangled her feet in the water, tossing bits of bread from her peanut butter and jelly sandwich to the ducks hovering a few feet away.
“Because,” she said, “you see, I don’t think so. I keep looking for books in the library that talk about how much protein people need and what kind, and I haven’t read anything yet that convinces me we have to get it from eating animals. What do you think?”
“I guess I never thought about it,” I said, feeling her passion.
“I don’t think most people ever have,” she said without any criticism in her voice.
Her tone was considering, as if she were wading through the logic right then and there with me.
“For example, we’ve given names to foods that don’t say what it is we’re eating, like a hamburger is not called ‘cow shoulder’.
Do you think people would eat it if it was called that? ”
“Uh, no,” I said.
“And bacon. I mean, what does bacon have to do with what you’re eating?”
“I guess that’s the whole idea,” I said. “So people can deceive themselves.”
Things were slow, so I closed the gap between us and sat down next to her on the dock.
“Don’t you think a lot of things in life are like that?” she said. “We don’t want to look at the truth, so we call it something else or put a label on it that hides what it is.”
“Maybe,” I said. “What’s got you thinking about all this?”
She lifted her shoulders and shrugged. “When I was a girl, and we would drive down here to visit, we used to pass all these pastures full of cows grazing. They’d have babies by their sides, and the babies would be running around playing in the grass.
I used to think it was such an amazing sight, that maybe that’s what heaven would be like.
It was something I looked forward to about the drive down here.
But then one weekend we drove by this farm, and there was a tractor-trailer backed up in the middle of the field.
They had this section of gates that made a big square around it.
They were chasing the cows into the enclosure and onto the back of the truck.
Some of the older babies weren’t being allowed to get on the truck, just the mamas and I asked Daddy where they were taking them and why they wouldn’t let all of them get on.
I remember it took him a moment to answer me, but he’s always tried to tell me the truth even when he didn’t want to.
When he told me where they were taking them, I started screaming and rolled down the window and stuck my head out and yelled at the people to stop.
Daddy drove on faster because I guess he didn’t want the people to think I’d lost it, but then I started begging him to go back and buy all the cows so they wouldn’t have to go there.
He told me that he couldn’t do that and it wouldn’t matter anyway because if people want to buy hamburgers and steaks, that’s what’s going to happen to cows.
I didn’t speak to him for a week, I was so angry at him.
It took me that long to admit he was right.
It made me angry at the whole world. I still am. Angry.”
I stared at her, noting the way she wouldn’t look up at me, her shoulders stiff and rigid as she stared down at her feet in the water.
I could tell she was waiting for my answer and that what I said would make or break her.
I didn’t want to answer her because I didn’t want that kind of power.
I just knew that she cared what I thought.
And so I considered my answer before saying, “I think, Sawyer, that’s one of the most awful things about growing up and not being a kid anymore.
The realization that there are some things in this world that we don’t see the way other people see them.
That some of those things we’re never going to change.
That maybe all we can do is live our version of truth and what we believe is right to the best of our ability.
And even that won’t be perfect. But what if everyone did their part in making the world a compassionate place?
Wouldn’t that add up to things being drastically different? ”
She did look at me then, our eyes meeting and holding before she said, “Yeah. I think it would.”
And it was in that moment on that hot, summer afternoon that I think we both realized we saw in each other some reflection of ourselves that maybe no one else had ever seen.
Or maybe we’d never let anyone else see for fear of being judged or ridiculed.
And even though there was still a shimmer of tears in her eyes, Sawyer had smiled at me.
The thing I could compare it to was the sun rising in the sky after days and days of rain.
I felt the connection between us click into place, life-changing and permanent.
When I think of that day now, it’s the stillness that haunts me, the way the fog on the lake never lifted, just hovered there, blurring the edges of everything.
Maybe that’s how grief works. It hides what’s too painful to look at until you’re ready to see it again.
I wonder if that’s what Sawyer’s been trying to do all these years—see her brother’s face through the fog and not the loss.
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet