Little Earthquakes Read online

  “Ha, ha, very funny,” Kelly had said.

  “I have to give him a bath,” Ayinde said. “His little stump fell off last night . . .”

  “Oh, we should get going,” Becky said, struggling out of the plush couch. Kelly got to her feet.

  “Thank you so much for the bag,” she said. “You really didn’t need to.”

  “Actually,” Ayinde said, smoothing the baby’s blanket, “I was wondering if you’d stay and supervise. The nurses showed me how to do it in the hospital . . . they made it look so easy.”

  “Of course we’ll stay!” Becky said.

  “I can help,” said Kelly. She blushed, hoping she hadn’t sounded too eager. “I gave my brothers and sisters a million baths.” She could remember standing over the chipped kitchen sink, the lullabies she’d sing as she squeezed a washcloth over their tiny heads to rinse away the shampoo.

  “I’m glad one of us knows what she’s doing,” Ayinde said. She led them upstairs to the bathroom, which was stocked with hooded towels, washcloths, and, Kelly was pleased to see, the same blue plastic tub that Kelly herself had purchased four weeks before. Becky filled the tub. Ayinde undressed the baby, then looked at him, naked in her arms, and took a deep breath. “Do you want to get him started?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Kelly said. She took Julian and eased him, feetfirst, into the water. “Here you go, mister, your first bath. Isn’t this fun? You just go slowly,” she told Ayinde, “so it’s not a big shock . . . there!” She settled the baby into the tub. Julian made a little eh, eh, eh noise, then began splashing his hands into the water with a shriek.

  “Hey, cutie,” Kelly said, trickling water over Julian’s belly. “I think he likes it.” After a few minutes in the water and some work with the washcloth, she spread a towel across her chest, lifted the baby out of the water, and bundled him like a burrito before handing him back to his mother. “Thanks,” Ayinde said. “Both of you, thank you so much.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Kelly made it back to her apartment just as her own phone started ringing for the monthly all-girl conference call. “Hey, sis,” said Doreen. “How goes the pregnancy?”

  “Just great!” said Kelly. She set down her grocery bags in the empty hallway and carried the box from Pottery Barn Kids through the empty living room and dining room and into the nursery, which, other than their bedroom, was the only room in the apartment that had furniture. Kelly didn’t want to buy cheap stuff they’d just have to replace, so she decided to wait until they could afford exactly the things she wanted: the perfectly curved celadon-green upholstered couch, the window treatments of Robert Allen farmhouse-print toile, the mahogany console tables and credenzas, the Mitchell Gold loveseat in mushroom-colored suede, all of them bookmarked and catalogued in the Favorites file on Kelly’s computer. Still cutting out pictures? her mother had asked the last time Kelly saw her (her mother had been in the hospital then, the exact yellow of a ripe banana). I don’t have to anymore, Kelly said. She remembered the first time she’d seen this apartment—and, more to the point, its rent. Steve, we shouldn’t, she told her husband, and he’d taken her hand and said, We deserve it. You deserve it, and signed the lease on the spot.

  “So what can we get you?” asked Mary. “What do you need?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” Kelly said hastily, not even wanting to think about what constituted an appropriate baby gift in her sister’s mind. “The nursery’s actually been done for a while.”

  Her sisters laughed. “That’s our Kelly,” Maureen said.

  Kelly frowned as she sat down on the rocker with its custom-ordered red-and-white slipcovered seat cushion. Lemon, the golden retriever they’d bought from a breeder last year, curled happily at her feet. “I just didn’t want to take any chances. Even if you register, people get things wrong. Like, for example, say you register for the red-checked gingham crib sheet on page thirty-two of the Pottery Barn Kids catalog . . .”

  “For instance,” said Mary. Her rumbling laugh turned into a coughing fit. She’d been trying to quit smoking again, but from the sound of things, she hadn’t succeeded.

  “You register for that,” Kelly continued doggedly, “but someone could decide to get you a red gingham sheet from somewhere else or even just a red sheet that they bought on clearance . . .”

  “Oh, God forbid,” said Doreen.

  “Well, then you can’t return it!” Kelly said. “And then you’re stuck!”

  “The horror,” said Mary, rumbling her laugh again. Kelly closed her eyes, cursing herself for telling her sisters anything. Mary and her husband and their three kids lived in the old house in Oceania, where everything was dingy and falling apart and smelled like cigarettes. Mary wouldn’t care what color a sheet was, as long as it was clean. And maybe she wouldn’t even care about that.

  “Never mind,” said Maureen. “If the nursery’s done, what do you need? Some toys or a diaper bag or something?”

  “I’ve got hand-me-downs,” Mary offered. Kelly made a face and changed the subject to Doreen’s boyfriend, Anthony the police officer, and what Doreen should bring when she went to meet his parents. “Flowers are always nice,” Kelly said.

  “Not wine?”

  “Well, you don’t know if they drink, and you don’t want them to think that you do.”

  “But I do drink!”

  “Yes,” Kelly said patiently, “but they don’t need to know that right away. Get a nice bouquet. Don’t spend more than twenty-five bucks, or it’ll look like you’re trying too hard, and no carnations.”

  Once the phone call was over, Kelly turned on the light and looked proudly at the baby’s room. The rocker was white-painted wood with red-and-white-striped cushions. The dresser was already filled with washed and folded outfits—socks and overalls and little hats and scarves that she’d been buying and squirreling away long before she got pregnant, before she’d even met Steve. Not in a crazy Miss Havisham way, but just an adorable sun hat here, a pair of perfect denim Oshkosh overalls there. So she’d be ready. So it would all be right.

  Kelly kicked off her shoes and ran her toes over the Peter Rabbit rug, sighing in satisfaction as Lemon licked her hand.

  New friends. Kelly shut her eyes, Ayinde’s living room still hanging like a vision behind her lids, and rocked. She’d had friends in high school and in college, but ever since Steve, she’d fallen out of touch with her girlfriends. They were still doing the single-in-the-city thing—happy hours and blind-date horror stories, blowing their paychecks on makeup and shoes. Kelly was just in a different place now. A better place. No more worrying about whether a guy would call or if she’d sit home alone on a Saturday night. She rocked back and forth, sighing in contentment, thinking about Steve and whether he’d ever get to meet Richard Towne and whether he’d make a fool of himself if he did. Steve had occasionally been known to go off the deep end, to hang on to a handshake past the point where the other person was clearly uncomfortable, to talk too long or too loudly about gay marriage or the flat tax or any one of the dozens of topics on which he held a strong opinion.

  She didn’t like to think about it, but the truth was that she’d met her husband on the rebound, after the guy she’d dated her sophomore and junior years had broken up with her. His name was Scott Schiff. She’d been desperately in love with him, and she thought he’d been in love with her, too. Then one night she’d gone to his apartment and tried to sit down on his bed, and he’d jumped up as soon as her bottom had hit the quilt. Oh, dear, she thought, as her heart sank. Not good.

  He paced across the room, rubbing his hands together like they were cold, and she’d known what he was saying without really hearing a word of it. “Fine!” she had said, cutting off his speech about how he cared for her a great deal but didn’t think they’d have a long-term future together. He made their relationship sound like she was a bond he didn’t want to risk his capital on. “It’s fine!”

  She knew why he was ending it. She’d seen the look on his face
when they pulled up outside the O’Hara family house for her mother’s funeral. She caught the way his nostrils had flared at the sight of the ancient van in the driveway, the frayed carpet on the stairs, the single bathroom on the second floor that all eight kids had shared. His parents’ walls were hung with original watercolors; the walls at Casa O’Hara were decorated with framed eight-by-tens of each child’s high school graduation portrait and—oh, how she’d kicked herself for not getting Maureen to take it down—a huge crucifix with a buff Savior in a skimpy loincloth with gaudy drops of blood painted onto His hands. Scott was a major catch, four years older than Kelly, getting his MBA at Wharton. She hadn’t lied, not exactly, when she’d told him she’d grown up on the shore. It was technically true, but, clearly, he imagined something more along the lines of the six-bedroom summer cottage his parents owned in Newport instead of this shabby house in a crummy working-class town on the Jersey shore. She guessed she should have been grateful that he stayed with her for even a minute once her mother was in the ground.

  “Are you okay?” Scott asked, as she bounded off his bed.

  “I’m fine. You know, it’s actually kind of a relief,” she said. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. I didn’t see a strong long-term picture here, either.” She forced herself to look at him, blinking rapidly so the tears in her eyes wouldn’t spill onto her cheeks. “I hope you weren’t thinking of . . . you know . . . a future together. Because I wasn’t.” She crossed the room to where he was standing, feet shoulder-width apart, hands clasped, the very portrait of the modern CEO-to-be, and took his hands. “I’m sorry if I misled you.” Her little speech left him flummoxed and silent, the way she’d hoped it would. She made a fast sweep of his place, gathering up her things—a hairbrush, a pair of running shoes, her copy of Smart Women Finish First—because she knew that having to see him again with a box of her stuff in his arms would send her right over the edge.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice so gentle that she knew she couldn’t look at him or she’d start to cry and beg him to let her stay. “You don’t have to do that now.” He looked miserable as he cleared his throat. “I know this has been a hard year for you. Your mother . . .”

  “Oh, that was a long time coming. We’d made our peace. Really. It’s okay!” she said. Toothbrush. Dental floss. Perfume from the Gap that she’d poured into the Boucheron bottle her roommate had tossed. She went to his kitchen for a plastic bag. “I’ll see you around. Take care now!”

  She made it to the elevator in his high-rise building before she had to lean against the wall. Breathe, she told herself, the way she had when the phone had rung four months ago and it had been Mary, twenty-six but sounding six years old, crying and calling her by her little-girl nickname. “Kay-Kay, Mommy’s gone.”

  Kelly forced herself off the wall in case Scott thought to stick his head out the door to look for her. She tucked the plastic bag under her arm, took the elevator down to the ground floor, crossed the campus, and found a bar, which was loud and hot and crowded. She pushed her way through the crowd and ordered a double vodka, straight up, and gulped it down like a kid swallowing cough syrup. She didn’t make a habit of this. She’d only done it once since high school, the night before her mother’s funeral, at a bar in Wildwood with her sisters beside her, and it hadn’t been vodka then but Maker’s Mark, their mother’s beverage of choice. Paula O’Hara had poured it into her Tab and plopped in front of the television set, the pink can in her hands, the blue glow painting her cheeks, watching Dynasty and Dallas and tapes of Days of Our Lives while the eight of them came and went.

  The bartender held the bottle in the air.

  “Do it again,” Kelly said. Stupid. God, she’d been so stupid, thinking that Scott Schiff was The One, turning down the other guys who’d asked her out, putting all her eggs in one biscuit, or basket, or whatever it was you weren’t supposed to put all of your eggs into. She gulped her second shot, ordered her third, and was reaching for her purse, trying to remember how much money she had, when suddenly there was a hand on top of her own.

  “Let me get that.”

  Kelly looked up and saw a guy in a navy-blue suit. Nice looking enough, she thought—a little pale and pinched, his eyes a little too intense—but who in the entire University of Pennsylvania, professors excepted, wore a suit on a Saturday night? A suit with—she looked down, feeling herself wobble on the bar stool—wingtips?

  She peered through the cigarette smoke at the guy, who had pale-blue eyes, thin red lips, carefully combed brown hair that was already thinning a bit, and a prominent Adam’s apple above his blue-and-gold tie.

  “What’s with the suit?” she said, yelling to make herself heard over the babble of voices and Hootie and the Blowfish issuing from the jukebox.

  “I like suits,” the guy yelled back. “I’m Steven Day.”

  “Congratulations,” she said and emptied her glass.

  “Whoa, slow down,” he said. She squinted at him. Her head was already feeling fuzzy.

  “Don’t tell me what to do. You’re not my father.” Because if you were, she thought, you’d have three days’ worth of stubble and you’d be trapped with a family you hated, and you’d deliver the mail for a living, and your only suit would be twenty years old.

  Steven Day did not look the least bit abashed. “Come outside, Kelly,” he said, as he took a firm grip on her elbow. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

  She made a face but allowed him to maneuver her off of her seat and out of the bar. “How do you know my name?”

  “I’ve been watching you.”

  She stared, trying to place him. “You have? Why?” She realized that she was talking too loudly—it had been noisy in the bar, but outside, the fall air was crisp and her voice was carrying. “Why?” she asked again, more quietly.

  “Because I think you’re beautiful,” he said, steering her down the sidewalk. She could feel his breath against her cheek as he formed each word. “We were in economics seminar together.”

  She remembered meeting a guy in the graduate-level economics seminar she’d talked her advisor into letting her take, but it had been Scott Schiff. Although something was tugging at her memory—a guy in a suit who sat in the back of the room and could turn any question into a passionate defense of the free market, a guy who wore suits while everyone else came to class dressed in jeans and sweatshirts and sneakers.

  Alex Keaton wannabe, she thought, as she wobbled sideways, almost crashing into a bus shelter. Steven Day steadied her. “Are you all right?”

  Half a dozen of her typical responses bubbled to her lips. Sure! Fine! Great! Instead Kelly sagged against him and let her eyes slip shut. “No, I’m not. Not really.”

  “Are you worried about midterms?”

  She shook her head. “Midterms are about the least of my problems right now.”

  “So what’s wrong?”

  “Well, for one thing, you didn’t let me get another drink.” She shoved her bangs out of her eyes. All through high school in Oceania, she’d permed her hair. Her first day at Penn she noticed that nobody else had permed hair. She couldn’t afford to have hers straightened, so after the second day of classes, she found a West Philadelphia barbershop a few blocks off campus. She parked herself in the black leather chair in front of the astonished barber and said, Cut it all off. She had a pixie cut for the rest of college. It was her signature look, and at twelve bucks per trim, it was one she could afford.

  She peered up at him. His face in the darkness hung above her like the moon. “Do you really think I’m beautiful?”

  He nodded at her, very seriously. “Come on. Let’s go to my place.”

  She drew herself upright, mustering what was left of her dignity and her sobriety. “I am not going back to your place. I just met you.” She licked her lips and ran her hands through the mess of her hairdo and peered at him through her vodka haze. “You have to buy me dinner first.”

  “Sit here,” Steven Day instructed, and he parked Ke
lly on the bench inside the bus shelter. “Don’t move.”

  She closed her eyes and held perfectly still. Five minutes later, Steven Day, wingtips and all, was standing in front of her with a fragrant, grease-spotted bag from McDonald’s in his hand. “Here,” he said, pulling her to her feet. “Dinner.”

  For two blocks, Kelly wobbled past clusters of chattering undergrads and sorority girls all in a row, popping french fries into her mouth and telling Steven the short but tragic story of Scott Schiff.

  “He wasn’t such a good guy, anyhow,” she said through a mouthful of fried potato. At that moment, after the vodka, she felt as though she could tell Steven Day anything, as if nobody had ever understood her the way Steven Day did. “You wanna know what I think?”

  Steven Day panted and pulled Kelly away from the pile of recently raked leaves she was attempting to lie down on top of. “Sure.”

  “I think he wanted a rich girl. Someone with a fancy last name and a big dowry.”

  “I don’t think women really have dowries anymore.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. I’m from New Jersey, you know? It’s not fancy. My dad works for the government. My mom . . .” She stopped herself. She was drunk but not drunk enough to start talking about her mother. “It’s not that impressive.”

  “I think,” he said, “that America’s more of a meritocracy these days.”