Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

  Kelly wiped Oliver’s chin. She found that she didn’t care much about the women who would follow in her footsteps. Nor did she care how foolish she looked in the magazine, how ridiculous she appeared in the picture, what unkind things her coworkers had whispered into Amy Mayhew’s ear. She was too spent, too overworked, and too tired to care about any of it anymore. “You know what the women who follow in my footsteps should worry about?” she asked Oliver. “Their husbands losing their jobs.” And what was this bullshit about “a tiny, peppy blonde”? As if any man in the history of recorded time had ever been described that way in print. And “chatting away like girlfriends”? In your dreams, Amy Mayhew, she thought. My girlfriends don’t stab me in the back.

  She went through the next hour and a half in a fog—bathing the baby, putting on his pajamas, reading him Curious George while he batted at the pages and tried to chew the back cover, nursing him, rocking him, easing him into his crib while he arched his back and held himself rigid and screamed for what had become his customary ten minutes before finally dropping off. Then she went back to the rocker and sat there with her feet on the Peter Rabbit rug, the red-and-white-checked gingham sheets matching the red-and-white quilt, the lampshade and the wall hanging painted with her son’s name, his blankets and sweaters all folded and tucked away. It all looked perfect. The way she’d imagined it, sitting here rocking, when she was pregnant. What a joke.

  She couldn’t keep working at Eventives. That much was clear. Not after they’d called her—what was it? “Distracted and ditzy.” Anonymously, of course. The cowards didn’t even have the guts to affix their names to their insults. But if she didn’t keep working, there was no way they could keep the apartment. Even if Elizabeth was willing to pay her severance and give her cash for the vacation days she’d never taken, between the health insurance and the car payments, it would be a matter of months before she couldn’t pay the rent.

  So they’d move. She could find somewhere cheaper. Then she’d have to find another job. Full-time, most likely, because it was clear that she wasn’t constitutionally cut out for the balancing act of part-time work, and if she was going to be Oliver’s sole support, part-time wouldn’t pay well enough.

  Maybe Becky would hire her, now that Lia was going back to Los Angeles. Or help her find something. Maybe she could be a restaurant consultant, helping them with their business plans, figuring out what neighborhoods would be receptive to what kind of establishment. Kelly started to get up out of the rocker, to reach for a notebook, to start making a list, and found that she couldn’t. No energy. No motivation. She felt like a toy with the batteries yanked out.

  She groped for the telephone with her eyes closed, dialing the numbers by heart.

  “Hello?” said Mary. “Kelly, is that you? Is something wrong?”

  Kelly rocked herself back and forth. “Something is.”

  “I’ll get the girls,” Mary said. There was a click as she put Kelly on hold. A minute later, she was back with Doreen in New Jersey, Maureen in San Diego, and Terry in Vermont on the line.

  “What’s up?” asked Terry.

  “It’s Steve,” said Kelly. “Well, actually, it’s everything.”

  For once, none of her sisters were laughing at her. “What’s going on?” Mary asked.

  “Steve left.” Horrified silence. “He lost his job.”

  “I knew it!” Terry crowed.

  “Terry, that’s not helping,” said Doreen.

  “When?” asked Terry.

  “Before Oliver was born,” Kelly said.

  The sisters gasped identically.

  “It’s been hard,” Kelly said. “I’ve been working and taking care of the baby, and Steve’s been just . . . well, I don’t know what Steve’s been doing.”

  “Steve’s a loser,” said Mary.

  “Let’s kill him!” said Terry.

  “Terry, shut up,” said Maureen.

  “He’s not a loser,” Kelly said. She rocked back and forth faster, knowing that this would be the hard part. “He just wasn’t cut out to work for a big company, I guess. He wanted to be a teacher, I think, and I didn’t want to let him.” She felt her throat tightening. “And he wanted to help with Oliver, and I wouldn’t let him do that, either. I just thought I was the only one who could do it right.”

  “No way,” Mary said sarcastically. “Not you.”

  “Please don’t make fun of me,” Kelly said, wiping her eyes. “Please don’t.”

  “Sorry,” Mary said, laughing her rumbling laugh. “Sorry.”

  Kelly held the telephone tightly, picturing her sisters’ faces. “It’s been awful. I was so angry at Steve, and I’ve been so tired, and . . .” She closed her eyes. “I just thought I had it all figured out.”

  “You always did,” said Mary, but she didn’t sound judgmental. Just sad. “Do you need money? Or a place to stay, just to give yourself a break? We’ve got the guest room.”

  “Where’s Steve?” asked Doreen.

  “He left,” Kelly said. “He’s gone.”

  “So we’ll find him! And kill him!” Terry said.

  “Not helping, Terry. Oliver needs a father,” said Doreen.

  Mary murmured in agreement. “You should call him,” she said.

  “I know,” said Kelly. She hadn’t wanted to hear it, but she knew that it was true. “Call him and then what?”

  “Tell him you’re sorry,” said Maureen. Kelly felt her temper flare—Sorry for what? Sorry for supporting us? For paying the bills?

  “You have to let people be who they want,” Terry said. “Even if it’s not what you want them to be.”

  “Terry, that’s profound,” said Kelly.

  “I know!” said Terry, sounding pleased with herself. “Like, remember the summer you wanted me to work at Scoops with you, only I wanted to be a camp counselor? It’s just like that!”

  “Well, more or less,” said Mary.

  “We’re here if you need us,” Maureen said. “And you don’t have to be perfect for us.” She paused. “It’s not all happily-ever-after, Kay-Kay. It’s only that easy in fairy tales.”

  “But I have to try,” Kelly said, knowing that she was talking to herself as much as to her sisters. And it was Terry, the youngest sister, who answered for all of them.

  “Yes,” she said. “You have to try.”

  Mary agreed to take care of the baby on Saturday afternoon. Steve was waiting at the door of the coffee shop where she used to sweat and swear over her crappy laptop, and Kelly was jolted back to the first time she’d seen him, wearing that incongruous suit and tie, bending over her at a bar. No suit today, she saw. Steve wore a blue sweater that she didn’t recognize, khaki pants, and boots with snow dripping from the soles.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He looked up. His face was unreadable. “Hi, Kelly.” He cleared his throat. “You look good.”

  I’m not, she wanted to say. I’m not good at all. It had been five weeks since he’d left, and she’d missed him so intensely that it felt as if she’d had a headache every moment she was awake. For months and months, she’d been wishing him gone when she wasn’t daydreaming about ways to murder him and make it look like a shaving accident. No more dirty dishes to pick up, no more shoes to pick up and put back in the closet, no more messes to clean that weren’t made by Lemon or Oliver. She hadn’t thought about the silence, the way, after Oliver fell asleep, that the apartment was so quiet she could hear the rustle as she turned the pages of the Bible her mother had left her.

  Try, she remembered her sisters telling her. You have to try.

  “Come on in. It’s cold,” he said, holding the door open.

  She stood on the sidewalk. Steve looked at her with his eyebrows raised.

  “No,” she said. “I have to show you something first.”

  “Show me . . .”

  “We have to go for a ride.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Steve had met her whole family only once before their wedding, on
the day of Kelly’s graduation. She’d planned the day meticulously, making the reservation at Hikaru months in advance, buying her father a new jacket and tie for Christmas, taking Terry and Doreen out for sushi when they visited her on campus that spring. She’d made a half dozen phone calls the week of graduation, drilling her siblings on what they were going to wear, reminding Terry and Doreen to practice with their chopsticks, thinking that she’d learned her lesson with Scott Schiff and her family was going to behave like upstanding, middle-class citizens and not Coors-swilling, chain-smokers from some crummy seaside town in New Jersey.

  Of course, the day had been a disaster. Her father had poked at his sashimi with the tip of one chopstick, lifting the slices of eel and fluke as if they were evidence at a crime scene. Her sisters had giggled and whispered to each other over bowls of teriyaki chicken, then slipped outside to sneak cigarettes by the Dumpster, and her brother Charlie had gotten drunk on the sake Kelly had ordered for the table and hadn’t quite made it to the bathroom before he threw up. Steven’s parents looked at them like they were a pack of rats, while Kelly sat at the head of the table wearing the pearls Steve had bought her as a graduation gift, smiling and nodding until she felt like a bobble-head doll. And what do you do? Kenneth Day had asked her father, and Kelly held her breath until her father recited what she’d advised him to say. I work for the government.

  “He delivers the mail,” Kelly said, as she drove toward the turnpike.

  “What?”

  “My father,” she said. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. She hadn’t told Steve much about her family, and she’d certainly never taken him to the house where she’d grown up, but if they were going to go on as husband and wife, he had to understand. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  “Kelly? Where are we going?”

  “Home,” she said, her foot pressing down hard on the gas pedal. “We’re going home.”

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, they pulled up to the dingy Cape Cod house at the end of a cul-de-sac. She let Steve take it in through the car window: the patchy lawn, the peeling paint, the half-assembled pickup truck in the driveway, and the fading black-and-gold stickers that spelled out O’HARA on the green mailbox.

  She looked straight ahead with her hands on the steering wheel. “I was never a Girl Scout,” she said. “You know why? Because you needed a uniform to be a Girl Scout, and my parents didn’t have enough money to buy one, and they didn’t want to take charity.”

  “Oh.” His voice was quiet in their too-big car.

  “Whenever we got invited to other kids’ birthday parties, we’d bring something from the dollar store wrapped in the comics from the Sunday paper, so eventually we’d make excuses about why we couldn’t go. And every Christmas . . .” Her voice caught in her throat. “The ladies from the church would bring a basket with a turkey in it and whatever toys we’d asked for. Anything we wanted, they’d bring us, and they’d wrap it, too. And the cards would say ‘From Santa,’ but we figured out who they were really from, and we stopped asking because we all knew that taking charity was even worse than being poor.”

  Her voice was flat. Her hands looked horrible; the nails ragged and bitten, the cuticles cracked and bleeding. “I hated this house. I hated everything about it. I hated wearing my sister’s hand-me-downs. I hated how everything smelled like cigarette smoke and how there was never anything nice or new and how . . .” She wiped her eyes. “When we got married, I promised myself that if I had a baby, I was going to be able to buy him everything he needed. He’d always feel safe. He’d never have to feel like he was growing up in a house like a leaky boat where the bottom could just fall out.” She turned and looked at her husband in the eyes. “That was why I wanted you to go get a job. That was why it mattered so much. It made me crazy to think that we were going to go through our savings because . . .” She lifted her hands in the air. “Then what?” She looked past him, through the window, toward the house. “This?”

  “Kelly.” He reached for her hands. “I never had any idea. If you’d told me . . .”

  “But I couldn’t.” She bit back a sob. “I didn’t want you to know, I didn’t want you to see . . .” She wiped her eyes and looked at him again. “I thought you wouldn’t love me anymore.”

  “Hey.” He reached for her, pulling her head to his shoulder. “I will love you forever. I’ll take care of you. And Oliver. I just . . .” He exhaled. “I figured, we had the money, there wasn’t any rush, I could stay home and be with the baby.” He shook his head ruefully. “I couldn’t figure out why you were so frantic.” He rubbed one hand up and down his cheek. “Now I think I get it. And in spite of what you were thinking, it was never my intention to lie around on the couch forever.”

  “But that’s what you were doing.”

  “For six months, yeah,” Steve said. He started jiggling his leg. “I didn’t take the whole layoff thing very well. It really threw me. And I just figured I’d take a break, take some time, spend time with the baby, get back on my feet.” He paused, looking out the window. “My father was never around,” Steve said. “I wanted to be a different kind of dad.” He gave her a crooked smile. “If I’d known that—if you’d told me—I would have started working again. Even if it meant I wasn’t seeing Oliver.” His voice dropped. “If that’s what it took to keep you.”

  She rested her cheek against him. She could hear the ticks of the engine cooling and, somewhere, not far off, a mother calling her child inside. “I thought I told you. I know I tried. I . . .” But even as she spoke, a part of her wondered. What had she said, exactly? What had she said out loud, and what had she only thought?

  He wrapped his arm around her. “We made mistakes,” he said. “Both of us did. But we’ve got a little boy now, Kelly. We have to work things out.”

  She sniffled. “I wish I’d known,” she said. “I wish I’d known how it was going to turn out. I wish I’d known what was going to happen . . .”

  “Hey,” he said. “We didn’t register for a crystal ball. But I know this. I’m not Scott Schiff, and I’m not your father.” He gestured at himself, grinning his crooked grin. She remembered looking up at him, half drunk in a pile of leaves. He’d brought her french fries. He’d told her she was beautiful. And she’d believed him.

  “See?” he asked, pointing. “No mailbag. Fly zipped . . .” He paused to check. “Most of the time. Whether I wind up teaching, or whatever, I will always take care of you and Oliver.”

  “Do you promise?” she asked. Her voice wobbled. He bent his head close, brushing her cheek with his lips.

  “Will you believe me if I do?”

  She nodded. “I want things to be different,” she whispered, half to herself.

  “Things can be however you want them,” Steve said. She leaned into his body with her eyes closed, letting him support her weight, letting him stroke her hair, letting herself be held.

  March

  LIA

  I sat in the park with my mother’s blue suitcase and the lunch Sarah had packed at my feet. My friends were gathered around me—Kelly, who’d pulled Oliver over in a new red wagon; Becky, with Ava in a backpack; and Ayinde, tall and stern and beautiful, as if she’d been sculpted, her face a clay mask finished in the heat of a kiln, holding Julian in her arms. The sky was slate gray, the temperature in the forties, but the wind had a hint of softness to it, and I could see the buds on the dogwood and cherry trees, tight little knots of red and pink, the sign of spring to come. Sam had flown back to California two weeks ago to start furnishing the house he’d picked out, and I’d stayed behind in Philadelphia to pack, to close up the apartment, and to say my good-byes. Sam was returning in the afternoon to take me home.

  “You do realize that you’re breaking Dash the dishwasher’s heart?” Becky asked.

  “He’ll get over it,” I said.

  “We’ll miss you,” Kelly said, sounding small and forlorn. “Do you really have to go live there?”

/>   “It’s where Sam is,” I said. “And work, if I ever work again. And . . .” I wasn’t sure I’d be able to trust my voice. “It’s where Caleb is buried. I think I’d always like to live close enough so that I could go visit.”

  All three of them nodded. Becky cleared her throat. “I have news.”

  “Good news?” Kelly asked.

  “I think so. I hope so.” She lifted Ava, in a pink fleece coat and pink sweatpants, in her arms and stood up straight. “I’m. Um. A little bit pregnant.”

  “Oh my God, are you serious?” Kelly shrieked. “You had sex, didn’t you?”

  “Can’t get anything by you,” Becky said with a smile.

  “You had sex, and now you’re pregnant!”

  “What are you, my eighth-grade health teacher?” Becky grumbled, but she was smiling. Glowing, actually. “It’s a little overwhelming, but we’re happy about it. Most of the time.” She looked at Ava, who wrinkled her nose and giggled. “I don’t know how this one’s going to feel.”

  “What did Mimi say?” Kelly asked.

  Becky rolled her eyes. “We haven’t told her yet. And the truce is still holding, although at this point I’ve had to bite my tongue so many times I’m surprised it’s still attached.” She shrugged. “I’ve got to do it, though, if I want my marriage to work.”

  All three of us turned unconsciously toward Kelly, and, just as fast, all three of us turned away. She’d noticed, though. “I think,” she said, in a small voice, with her head bent over the wagon. “I think we’re going to be okay.” She sat on the bench, pushing Oliver back and forth in his little red wagon. “I think Steve and I both had a picture in our heads when we got married, a picture of how it was going to be.”

  “Didn’t we all,” Ayinde said softly.

  “So it’s going to be different now. We’re moving into a smaller place,” she said and smiled. “With actual furniture. Steve’s going to start substitute teaching and interviewing for full-time jobs for the fall, and . . .” She cleared her throat. “I’m going back to school for interior design at Drexel. They’ve got a great program.” She looked at us shyly. “You guys liked Oliver’s nursery, right?”