Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner

hockey? Her sister would say, Shut up, Pollyanna. You’re not my mother. And Paula would be glaring at Kelly from her chair. No, you’re not their mother, she’d mumble sometimes, in a voice both angry and somehow confused, as if she was saying it out loud to convince herself that it was true. But somebody had to be their mother, Kelly thought; someone at least had to try, and after four in the afternoon, there was no way that Paula was up to the task. So she’d try. Michael, how was your science test? Terry, did you remember to get Mom to sign your permission slip? One by one, her siblings would carry their plates into the family room to eat in front of the television set, leaving Kelly and her parents alone at the table, in a room gone so quiet that you could hear their knives and forks moving over their plates.
    Becky told them she’d grown up in Florida and had come to Philadelphia for her husband’s residency. Ayinde was born in New York City, but had gone to Miss Porter’s in Connecticut for high school, then Yale for college, and she’d spent her summers abroad. Abroad. Kelly didn’t think that she herself could ever get away with using that word in a sentence, even though technically she could because she’d gone to Paris for her honeymoon. You had to be beautiful to use a word like that. It also helped if you didn’t come from New Jersey.
    Ayinde settled Julian over her shoulder to burp him, and Becky shifted on the couch, giving her belly small pats, as if it were a dog that had settled in her lap, and Kelly felt the silence stretching uncomfortably. There were a million questions she wanted to ask Ayinde— What was labor really like? foremost among them. Her mother had had so many babies, Kelly thought she’d have some idea, but she didn’t. Paula would leave either in the middle of the night or the middle of the day, and she’d come home a few days later, looking even more exhausted than normal, with a new little bundle in her arms for Kelly to wash and diaper and coo over. She’d tried to ask her sister Mary, the only one with children, some of her questions, but Mary had brushed her off. “Your labor will be fine, and your baby will be perfect,” Mary said, as her own three kids screamed in the background during the sisters’ first-of-the-month conference call. “And if it’s not, you’ll just return it for store credit.”
    “Ha, ha, very funny,” Kelly had said.
    “I have to give him a bath,” Ayinde said. “His little stump fell off last night…”
    “Oh, we should get going,” Becky said, struggling out of the plush couch. Kelly got to her feet.
    “Thank you so much for the bag,” she said. “You really didn’t need to.”
    “Actually,” Ayinde said, smoothing the baby’s blanket, “I was wondering if you’d stay and supervise. The nurses showed me how to do it in the hospital…they made it look so easy.”
    “Of course we’ll stay!” Becky said.
    “I can help,” said Kelly. She blushed, hoping she hadn’t sounded too eager. “I gave my brothers and sisters a million baths.” She could remember standing over the chipped kitchen sink, the lullabies she’d sing as she squeezed a washcloth over their tiny heads to rinse away the shampoo.
    “I’m glad one of us knows what she’s doing,” Ayinde said. She led them upstairs to the bathroom, which was stocked with hooded towels, washcloths, and, Kelly was pleased to see, the same blue plastic tub that Kelly herself had purchased four weeks before. Becky filled the tub. Ayinde undressed the baby, then looked at him, naked in her arms, and took a deep breath. “Do you want to get him started?” she asked.
    “Sure,” Kelly said. She took Julian and eased him, feet first, into the water. “Here you go, mister, your first bath. Isn’t this fun? You just go slowly,” she told Ayinde, “so it’s not a big shock…there!” She settled the baby into the tub. Julian made a little eh, eh, eh noise, then began