Free Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner Page A

In the summertime, she’d simply shift her routine a little, and instead of going to Shawcross Elementary at 7:15, she’d go to a diner for breakfast, go to the Y for a swim, and then go to the library, where she’d arrive as soon as the doors opened at nine and leave precisely at four o’clock, with a break at around noon to sit on the front steps and eat the sandwich (which alternated between tuna on rye and cream cheese and olives on white) that she’d packed in her purse. “What do you do there all day?” I’d asked once, when I was fourteen or so and we were still talking. She’d shrugged. “I read,” she’d said. Maybe she hadn’t meant it as a criticism, or for me to imagine the inevitable And it wouldn’t kill you to pick up a book every once in a while instead of lying in the backyard in your bikini, combing lemon juice through your hair, but that was what I heard.
    She walked into the living room with her black nylon book bag in one hand, her purse in the other. She blinked at me twice. Other than that, her face didn’t change. It was like I stopped over every week to sit in her living room with the shades pulled and the lights off.
    “So,” she said. “I can defrost another chicken breast for dinner. Do you still eat chicken?” Her first words to me. Her first words in eleven years. I almost laughed. Everything I’d been through, the distance I’d come, just to wind up back where I’d started, sitting on the same old blue couch, with my mother asking me if I still ate chicken.
    “Yes,” I said. “I do.”
    “I’m asking,” she said, “because I thought maybe you’d become a vegetarian.”
    “Why would you think that? Just because I moved to California?”
    “I thought I read it somewhere,” she muttered. I wondered what else she’d read about me, how much of the story she knew. Not much, I decided. She’d never been much for the movies or the movie magazines. “Trash,” she’d said. “Brain rot.” My father was the one who’d taken me to the movies, who’d buy me buttered popcorn and rattling boxes of Good & Plenty and wipe my face carefully before we drove back home.
    She brushed by me on her way up the stairs, pulled off her shoes, and walked through the kitchen in her panty-hosed feet. She was wearing black pants—“slacks,” she’d call them—a white blouse with a bow at the neck that I thought I’d remembered from before I’d left home.
    I followed her up the stairs and watched as she put the chicken in the microwave, then reached for the box of bread crumbs, an egg from the refrigerator, the cracked white bowl. She’d dipped the chicken pieces into that bowl before putting them on a cookie sheet to bake since time immemorial. She’d shrunk in my absence, just like the rest of the neighborhood. Her sandy-blond hair looked faded, her shoulders were slumping underneath her cotton-polyester-blend blouse, and there were brown patches on the backs of her hands. She was getting old, I saw, and it startled me. Time passing in the abstract was one thing, but seeing her was something else. I opened my mouth, thinking that I had to start somewhere, with someone; that I had to start figuring out how I would tell my story. I went to California and I fell in love… My throat felt like it was swelling shut. I imagined Sam standing in the movie theater lobby, maybe holding a tub of popcorn, wondering where I’d gone. I blinked rapidly, licked my lips, found a head of iceberg lettuce in the refrigerator, and started tearing it into chunks. My mother looked at my Vera Bradley monstrosity crouching at the base of the stairs. “Nice bag,” she said, handing me a bottle of low-fat ranch dressing.
    “So,” she continued, once the chicken was in the oven and a pair of potatoes were rotating in the microwave, “what brings you back to town?”
    Her tone was carefully neutral. Her eyes were on her feet. The answer was right on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t make myself