Sergio and Baker and lessons in staying

By Kevin Sue-A-Quan

Sergio Reyes and Bernard Baker meet as teenagers at a Catholic seminary in Queens. Baker is warm, physical, certain of himself in ways Sergio can only watch and catalogue. Sergio is careful, observant, and quietly undone by a friendship he cannot bring himself to name.

Over twenty years - through a confession on a frozen sidewalk, a prayer spoken over a lit candle, a summer that almost takes one of them, and a vocation that almost claims the other - they build a life around each other in the only language available to them: gesture, proximity, showing up.

Nothing is ever declared. Nothing needs to be.

Sergio and Baker and Lessons in Staying is a novel about what two people look like when they have been choosing each other, without fanfare, for the better part of their adult lives - and about the ordinary, stubborn, sacred act of not leaving.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GVRXRCCR
• ISBN13: 9798252796604
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.0"