Little Earthquakes Read Online Free PDF

making him work for it, making him wait. “Then I suppose I’d consider it.”
    She called to the cameraman, who’d gone off to shoot B-roll of the dance squad, twelve women shaking their hips and hair, and looking like they were in the grip of some communal form of epilepsy. “Eric, you ready to take another shot at Antoine?”
    Eric tore his attention away from the dancers and went all googly-eyed at the sight of Richard Towne. “Hey, man, nice game against the Lakers!”
    “Thank you, sir,” Richard said and returned his attention to Ayinde. “Friday night?”
    A basketball player, she thought to herself. What was it the young girls called them? Ballers. Her social life had never included one. There had been doctors and lawyers and businessmen, and once, much to the delight of her program director, a fling with the anchor at the NBC station, which got both of their names in the papers for the three months it had lasted. “Look,” she said. “I want to be clear about something. I’m grateful for your help, but if you’re looking for some damsel in distress, I’m not her.”
    Richard Towne shook his head. Ayinde found herself intoxicated with the sight of his body, the bulge of biceps, the sinewy forearms, those enormous hands.
    “Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t have any kind of savior thing going on. I’m a simple man,” he said, spreading his hands. “I just want to play a little basketball, maybe win another ring. Enjoy life, you know? You’re a serious lady. I appreciate that. But even working girls have to eat.”
    “True,” she said, allowing herself a smile.
    “I’ll call you at the station.” And with that he gave a courtly little half bow and trotted onto the hardwood. By the time she was back at the station, there was an enormous bouquet of lilacs and lilies on her desk. This is what they call the full-court press, the card read. Ayinde had laughed out loud before picking up the phone to call Richard Towne and tell him that Friday night was fine.
     
    Ayinde closed her eyes and tried to make her way through the contraction. “Okay,” said Becky. “Breathe…breathe…you’re doing just fine, keep breathing…”
    “Ohhh,” Ayinde sighed, as the contraction finally loosened its grasp. Becky had her balanced on a giant blue ball set in the middle of her tiny living room on one of the narrow little streets near Rittenhouse Square. Ayinde had been rocking back and forth, trying not to scream.
    “Sixty seconds,” said Kelly from the corner of the couch where she’d bundled herself in a blanket with a notebook and her watch.
    “Shouldn’t you girls go to the hospital now?” asked a voice from the staircase.
    “Ma, you’re hovering,” Becky said without turning her head.
    “I’m not hovering,” said Edith Rothstein, who had, indeed, been hovering on the staircase, visible only from the waist up, never setting a foot into the living room and practically wringing her hands since the three women had walked through the door five hours earlier. “I’m just concerned.”
    “Hovering!” Becky said. Her mother, a trim woman with a carefully styled cap of reddish-blond hair and a string of pearls she’d been twisting nonstop, pursed her lips. Edith had ostensibly come north for a cousin’s wedding in Mamaroneck but, Becky confided, her real business involved staring at Becky’s belly and conversing nonstop with her as-yet-unborn granddaughter. “I wouldn’t mind it so much,” Becky said, “except she hardly ever talks to me anymore. It’s like her field of vision stops at my neck.”
    Ayinde wiped her forehead and looked around. Becky’s living room was about the size of her own dressing room, and she was sure that no decorator had helped with the selection of the overstuffed bookshelves and the afghans that lay over the couch and the chairs, but the room was charming anyhow and it felt warm and safer than the hospital had.
    But not warm and safe enough for Becky’s