Read Online The Explanation for Everything by Lauren Grodstein - Free Book Online

makes the traveling team this year.”
    â€œDad!” Belle came running to him from the jungle gym. She had scratches on her legs, mosquito bites on her arms—her beautiful round face blighted by little red marks. “Can I go have pizza with Madeline’s family? Madeline’s mom said I should ask you.” From the playground, Madeline’s mother raised a hand in greeting, a semaphored “is that okay?”
    â€œHere, let me give you some money.” He handed Belle a five and off she ran, back toward the playground, to Madeline and Madeline’s mother. His girls had friends in Mount Deborah. They had soccer teams, people to eat pizza with, a school they seemed to like. A swimming pool of their very own. By the end of their two weeks in Ohio, Belle was starting to get anxious, antsy. “I want to go back to our house,” she said. “I don’t like it here anymore.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    She looked at him like it should be obvious. “I miss New Jersey.”
    Occasionally, when he was feeling maudlin, he asked Rachel if she could remember Miami. “A little,” she would say. “It was hot,” or “we lived in an apartment,” or “we went to Disney World that one time.” She didn’t say, “I remember how Mama used to sing me to sleep, Woody Guthrie songs.” She didn’t say, “I remember the way my mama’s hair fell in curls down her face.” She didn’t say, “I remember how much she loved me.” But oh how much she had loved those girls.
    Rachel was three and Belle was one and she had left the house that night to pick up some McDonald’s, because neither Andy nor Lou liked to cook back then and it was too late to scrounge up anything better than a couple of Big Macs and fries. Andy’s chronic worries about their money would slip in moments like this: obviously, it was cheaper to just boil some macaroni (a box of macaroni at Publix was forty-nine cents on special; they had stocked up over the weekend and now macaroni was spilling out of the cabinet they used as a pantry) but he’d been working so hard at the lab, and putting together job applications, and the idea of a McDonald’s burger and some beers . . .
    Belle was asleep in the small room the girls shared overlooking the pool in their complex. Rachel was playing. The apartment was pastel and Florida-bright and they always kept the air-conditioning on too high and this was another way that Andy should have been more vigilant about their finances but he hated to come home and be hot, he really did.
    Their last conversation: “I’ll go.”
    â€œNo, you’ve been drinking.” And that was true, he had been drinking, but just a little: three and a half bottles of Heineken in the two hours since he’d been home, during which he’d watched Dora the Explorer with Rachel while Lou nursed the baby, bathed the baby, teased him for singing the “I’m the Map” song, and put the baby down. It was easy to go through beers while watching Dora the Explorer. It was easy to drink too much in the air-conditioned escape from the Florida heat.
    â€œYou sure?”
    â€œIt’ll be good to get out of the house a little,” she said. She’d stopped working in the NICU once Belle was born, and now she taught yoga on Saturdays at the Gold Fitness on Palmetto (forty dollars per class and that was their AC bill right there) but spent most of her weekdays at the Publix, at the library, at the playground, at the pool. Lou always said that what surprised her the most about the girls was how physical the labor was: so much carrying, so much moisture. Little children were always damp. But then, when they slept: Belle in her crib, Rachel in the little bed they’d bought her off craigslist, shaped like a pink Corvette—their eyelashes so long and black against their white skin it was like they’d been