Read Online Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner - Free Book Online Page B

think?”
    Steven Day panted and pulled Kelly away from the pile of recently raked leaves she was attempting to lie down on top of. “Sure.”
    “I think he wanted a rich girl. Someone with a fancy last name and a big dowry.”
    “I don’t think women really have dowries anymore.”
    “Oh, you know what I mean. I’m from New Jersey, you know? It’s not fancy. My dad’s a postman. My mom…” She stopped herself. She was drunk but not drunk enough to start talking about her mother. “It’s not that impressive.”
    “I think,” he said, “that America’s more of a meritocracy these days.”
    She blinked until her muddled brain coughed up a definition of meritocracy. “Yeah, well, the meritocracy hasn’t made its way to Scott Schiff’s bedroom yet.” She swallowed her french fry and started to cry. And she never cried. Not even when Mary had called her, not at the funeral, not after, when her father, freshly shaven and wedged into a suit that Kelly remembered from her baby sister’s first communion, told her that her mother left a will. Doreen got Paula’s pearl earrings, Terry the diamond solitaire necklace their father bought her for their tenth anniversary, and Maureen the gold bracelet she’d gotten from her own mother. She left Mary her wedding rings. Her mother had left Kelly her rosary beads and her Bible. When her father handed over the Bible, a St. Joseph prayer card fell into Kelly’s lap. The card had marked the page from Ecclesiastes, yellow highlighter marking the verses Paula O’Hara wanted her daughter to have instead of diamonds and pearls: I made me great works; I builded me houses…. And behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.
    “I’m such an idiot,” Kelly wept, as he unlocked the door of his apartment. She knew that her nose was running all over the lapel of Steven Day’s suit, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I thought he loved me.”
    “Shh,” Steven said, smoothing her hair off her face. He pulled off Kelly’s shoes and sweater and slipped one of his T-shirts over her head. “Let me,” he whispered, and she’d blinked at him. His breath smelled of mint toothpaste, and it was cool against her cheek. At that moment, she was so weary, so sad, so completely empty—no Scott, no mother, no nothing—that she would have let him do anything at all, as long as she didn’t have to be alone.
    She sat up in Steve’s cluttered bedroom with his blue plaid sheets bunched in her hands. “Let you what?” she whispered back.
    He eased her head down onto the pillow and kissed her, first on the forehead, then, lightly, on the lips. “Let me take care of you.”
    Later that night, she’d woken up alone in the unfamiliar bed and looked across the room at the man who’d brought her there. He was still fully dressed, right down to his wingtips, with a blanket pulled up to his chin. His eyelids glimmered in the dark. It was five o’clock in the morning. You, she thought. She knew that she sounded like a housewife selecting a melon at the supermarket. She knew that she was still drunk, still chagrined and furious at the thought of Scott Schiff—and, for that matter, at the thought of her mother and that mocking bit of Scripture. None of it mattered. Her mind was made up. And when Kelly decided on something, that was what she got. She’d been that way since she was six years old. You, she thought, and that was that.
    By the next night, they had kissed, and that weekend, they slept together, and six months later, right before graduation, they were engaged, and six months after that, just after Kelly’s twenty-second birthday, they were husband and wife, living in this three-bedroom apartment on the eighteenth floor of a brand-new building on Market Street where the whole city was spread out, sparkling at her feet. The rent was technically more than they should have been spending—according to the formulas she’d seen, you were supposed to