Free Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner Page B

say the words. And I might have been wrong, but it seemed as if she was having the same trouble: She’d open her mouth, then close it. Once she said my name, but when I turned my head, she only shrugged and cleared her throat and stared at the floor some more.
    She pulled two plastic place mats out of the drawer where the plastic place mats had always resided. “Your grandmother died,” she said. “While you were gone. I would have called you, but…” She shrugged. She didn’t have my number, and she didn’t know my new name.
    “Did they pound a stake through her heart to make sure?”
    She pursed her lips. “I see California hasn’t changed that smart mouth of yours.”
    I didn’t say anything. My father’s mother had lived in Harrisburg, around the corner from her other daughter and my three cousins. She’d never had much time for me. I would see her once a year, the day after Thanksgiving. She always wore a sweatshirt with three painted handprints—one for each of my cousins. When I was eight, I asked why my handprint wasn’t there. She thought about it, pointed to the smallest of the handprints, and told me I was welcome to pretend that that one was mine. Gee, thanks.
    “Mom,” I began, before realizing I had no idea how to start this story, no idea what to say. I looked down at my plate and poked at my chicken.
    “You’re welcome to stay if you like,” she said quietly, her eyes not meeting mine.
    “Mom,” I said again. I met a man and we got married, and something terrible happened…
    “You’re my daughter,” she continued, “and you’ll always have a place here.” I waited for her to touch me, knowing that she wouldn’t. She had never touched me when I’d lived with her. My father gave the hugs. “You remember where your bedroom is,” she told me, pushing herself away from the table, scraping her mostly untouched plate into the trash can that was, I swear, the exact same trash can she’d had since we’d moved to this place twenty years before. “There are clean sheets on the bed.” And with that, she was gone.
    My bedroom was just the way I’d left it—pink shag carpet, Tom Cruise posters on the wall, a tiny single bed that creaked and listed to the left when I lay down on it. The bed was draped in a Strawberry Shortcake comforter, the one I’d coveted and nagged my parents for when I was eight years old. My mother had told me I already had a perfectly good comforter and that I’d be bored with Strawberry in a year. No, I begged. Please! I really, really want it, and I’ll never ask for anything again. In the end, it was my father who caved in and bought me the comforter for my birthday. Once he was gone, my mother made me keep that comforter on my bed all through high school. “Comforters don’t grow on trees,” she said. But she had enough money to spend on her own clothes, and mine, and, I noticed, a new comforter for herself—beige on beige, filled with some kind of starchy polyester filling, which made a scratching sound every time you touched it. It wasn’t about the money. The comforter was my punishment, a reminder of what girls got when they whined and nagged—a father who’d bolted, a ratty quilt stained with spilled Kool-Aid, bearing the face of a cartoon character nobody could even remember. By the end of ninth grade, I quit asking for a new comforter, and I quit bringing friends up to my bedroom. We hung out in the family room instead while my mother was at work, watching MTV and pilfering swallows of Baileys Irish Cream from the dusty bottles in the liquor cabinet.
    I stretched back on the bed and put my hands over my eyes. It was seven o’clock at night, four o’clock in California. I thought about my husband in our apartment, which had miniature rosebushes growing in pots on the narrow balcony and sheer golden curtains in the bedroom and nothing at all that was beige. We can get a house, Sam had told me, once he’d signed the contract for the sitcom.