Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online

Mbezi (born Lolly Morgan, but her mother had left that name behind). He came back to you smelling of some other woman’s perfume. And then she shut her eyes and gritted her teeth and held her breath and pushed so hard it felt as if she were turning herself inside out, hard enough to silence the voice that whispered in her mind, to forget that smell forever. She pushed until she could neither see nor hear, and then she fell back on her pillow, exhausted and spent and breathless…and certain. Perfume.
    A babble of voices rose up around her. “Okay, honey, ease off now…slow, slow, gentle…here come the shoulders.”
    She felt a sensation of slipping, of a great, twisting release, a sudden, shocking emptiness that reminded her, somehow, of her first orgasm, how it had taken her entirely by surprise and stolen her breath away.
    “Ayinde, look!” Dr. Mendlow called, beaming underneath his blue surgical cap.
    She looked up. And there was her baby, sheathed in a coat of grayish white, a head full of black hair slicked along his skull, full lips parted, tongue quivering, fists trembling in outrage.
    “Julian,” she said. Perfume, her mind whispered. Be quiet, she told it, and she stretched out her arms and reached for her son.

Kelly
    “Okay, so there’s Mary, Barry, then me, Kelly, then Charlie, Maureen and Doreen—they’re twins—Michael, and Terry. She’s the baby,” Kelly said. “Maureen’s in San Diego and Terry’s in college in Vermont. Everyone else is still in New Jersey. Everyone except me.” She and Becky had been in Ayinde’s house for half an hour, lavishing compliments on ten-day-old, six-pound-ten-
ounce baby Julian, and accepting Ayinde’s thank-yous and the Kate Spade diaper bags she’d given them both as gifts (“Oh, really, this is way too much,” Kelly had said, while inwardly she was thrilled and only wished that the bag had said Kate Spade in larger, more visible letters). Then they’d toured the house’s ground-floor living room, dining room, granite-countered kitchen with a Sub-Zero refrigerator and a Viking range, butler’s pantry, solarium. Finally the talk had turned to Kelly’s unfashionably large family, whose members Kelly could recite in a single breath— MaryBarrymeCharlieMaureenandDoreenthey’retwinsMichaelandTerryshe’sthebaby —and Kelly was eager to return to a topic that would put her on more equal footing with her new friends.
    “My husband’s a big Sixers fan,” she said. “He grew up in New York, and he used to be a Knicks man, but ever since he went to Wharton, it’s all about Allen Iverson. And Richard, of course.” She sat back, satisfied that she’d found an unobtrusive way to work Wharton into the conversation.
    “How long have you guys been married?” Becky asked.
    “Almost four years,” said Kelly.
    “Lord, you must have been a child bride,” Becky said.
    “I was twenty-two,” Kelly said. “I guess that’s young. But I knew what I wanted.” The women were sitting in Ayinde’s movie-theater-sized living room. Ayinde was nursing baby Julian, a tiny, sleepy-eyed pouty-lipped bundle in blue footie pajamas with a matching blue cap pulled over his curls. Kelly and Becky were side by side on the couch, sipping the tea and nibbling the cookies that a maid in a black-and-white uniform had carried in. Kelly couldn’t get over the room. Everything in it, from the richly patterned rugs to the tassled pillows on the couches and the gold-framed mirror that hung over the marble fireplace, was absolutely right. Kelly wanted to stay in this room forever or, better yet, have a room just like it herself someday.
    “Do you guys want a big family, too?” Becky asked.
    “Oh, God, no,” said Kelly, with a shudder she couldn’t quite suppress. “I mean, it wasn’t so bad. We had a big van that the church gave us a good deal on—we’re Catholic, I know, big surprise—and we had a really big dining-room table, and…” She shrugged. “That was about