Free Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner

spend something like a third of your income on your residence and they were spending more like half—but she hadn’t been able to resist the place. There were two full bathrooms, and they each had Jacuzzi tubs and marble floors. The wall-to-wall carpeting was brand new and so were the kitchen appliances, and the walls didn’t smell of decades of someone else’s meals—just of fresh paint. True, the lack of furniture was a problem—her sisters had practically busted a gut laughing when they’d seen the empty living room and complained about having to eat on the floor—but it was a minor inconvenience, and one that Kelly was certain wouldn’t last long. If Steve kept earning as much money as he did, in a year or two she’d be able to buy exactly what she wanted. And Oliver would have the best of everything—no hand-me-downs, no winter coats that smelled like cigarette smoke, no toys that some older sibling had broken. If he wanted something, all he would have to do is ask.
    She heard Steve’s key in the door, and she got to her feet. Oliver James, she whispered. She kissed her fingertips and tapped them on top of the crib’s mattress. Perfect. It was all going to be perfect.

Lia
    On my first flight to Los Angeles, when I was eighteen, I had the middle seat. The man sitting by the window was maybe thirty, with curly blond hair and a wedding ring and a briefcase full of candy—his daughter, he said, had loaded him up before he left. The entire five-hour flight I talked to him, flipping my freshly dyed blond hair over my shoulders, telling him about the parts I’d played in my high school’s musicals, the acting classes I was going to take, and the agent’s name I’d gotten. For five hours, the man had fed me Hershey’s Kisses and fruit-flavored chews, laughing and nodding, being—what? Bemused, I guessed. With my bad dye job and my delusions of what Los Angeles would be like, I must have been a bemusing sight. When we started our descent, he’d even changed places with me, giving me the window seat so that I could see California—“the promised land,” he’d called it—before he did.
    My flight back to Philadelphia eleven years later was different. I staggered through the airport like a zombie, paying for two seats so there’d be no chance of flying with a baby beside me. The week before, I’d been walking through the Beverly Center, just to have something to do, and a baby had started to cry and my breasts had started leaking and I’d wanted to die right there, just die on the spot. I paid cash for the rental car in Philadelphia, laying bills on the counter as the clerk at the Budget desk stared and asked me again and again whether I wouldn’t prefer to just put it on a credit card. But a credit card would have made it easy for Sam to find me, and I wasn’t ready to be found. Not yet.
    I was worried that I wouldn’t remember the way home, but I did. It felt like the red Kia I’d rented was driving itself—out I-95, past the Franklin Mills Mall, its parking lot packed as usual, past the sprawl of chain restaurants and cheap apartment complexes with RENT ME NOW banners flapping limply above the trash-littered ditches. Left onto Byberry, across the Boulevard, left and right and left again, the rented car’s wheels turning over streets that felt smaller and dimmer than they had when I’d lived here. The aluminum siding on the small ranch houses and even the asphalt on my street had faded, and the houses themselves seemed to have shrunk in the shadows of the trees, which had gotten taller. But some things hadn’t changed. My old key, the one I’d kept on my keychain for all that time, still turned in the lock. I set my bag at the foot of the stairs and sat in the living room without turning the lights on, watching the minutes tick past on the VCR clock.
    My mother came home at 4:15, which was exactly half an hour after the last bell rang at her school. She always came home at exactly that time.