One Small Thing Read Online Free PDF

whisper, “Don’t leave me,” and he’d wonder what they had really been fighting about after all.
     
    But Dan didn’t want an argument today. He was rested for the first time in weeks. He had the next three days off. He was going to work in the yard, swim, take Avery on a drive up the Sonoma Coast on Sunday. For at least one day, they weren’t going to think about the pregnancy. They weren’t going to mention the phrases “uterine body” or “blood levels” or “prostaglandin removal.”
     
    No. This weekend, they were going to be married, a couple, like they used to be, when it was simpler, when they could try to have a baby by turning out the lights and touching each other, back in the time when Dan was still ignorant of little rooms and girlie magazines; when he’d never had to hand his spunk in a little plastic container over to a nurse.
     
    They stood by the edge of the pool looking at the cover, and Dan could see that somehow, Avery had lumped a section of cover on the roll. He knew he’d have to unroll it and start over. “Listen, I can do this. Go ahead and finish your pasta. Don’t worry about the cover.”
     
    Avery wiped her forehead and then heard what he said, looking up and smiling. There she was. There was his girl, the one he had met at Peet’s six years ago, her hair the color of the summer foothills by his childhood Sacramento home. Her eyes were blue, sometimes gray, always full of light. He had imagined then and still imagined now that the light came from within her, her electricity, her drive, her current too strong to contain. If he had the right eyes, he knew he would see streaks of white shooting from her body like the flurries on the sun. She was that full of energy, electricity. She was that strong. As he’d waited long ago for the Rastafarian dude behind the counter to pour his coffee, Dan knew he’d found the woman who would make all the difference. The one who would burn away the past, leaving nothing but a space of time to be forgotten and then rewritten.
     
    “Thanks, honey.” Avery looked up at the sky. “It’s going to be hotter than all of last week.”
     
    “Yeah,” he said, bending over the cover, breathing in chlorine. “Go on. Get your work done.”
     
    She smiled again and turned away. He pulled on the wet plastic fabric, feeling the trail of her strong, hot light flick at his legs and then curl into their house, exactly where Dan wanted it.
     
     
     
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    “I couldn’t help myself,” Isabel was saying, opening the fridge, where she carefully placed the plate that held her wobbly green Jell-O salad. “I know you said you didn’t need it. But honestly, sweetie, I saw all the people out there getting ready. Another salad never hurts, believe you me.”
     
    Dan turned to Avery, who was biting the inside of her cheek. She’d finished the pasta, filled the cooler with Coronas, Calistoga waters, and soft drinks, taken a shower and dressed, her white shorts/ red top outfit clearly Fourth of July, but not the spangled red, white, and blue Isabel wore. Dan stared at his mother-in-law’s sequined baseball cap, the kitchen light reflecting off her entire head. She even had on red Keds with blue shoelaces and little white socks with lace. Her fingernails were painted red, and she wore a blue bandana twisted around her neck. A vein in Avery’s tight, smooth throat pulsed, one, two, one, two.
     
    “Great!” Avery said. “You’re right.”
     
    “The more the merrier,” Dan said, wishing he hadn’t. That was the phrase Mary, the nurse at Dr. Browne’s, always used just before he went into the little room clutching the latest copy of Playboy .
     
    Isabel smiled at him. “Loren and her family will be here soon. She’s got a terrific surprise! That whipped strawberry pie you girls used to love. You know, your grandmother’s recipe? What was it called? Sky pie?”
     
    “Spy pie.” Avery was biting her cheek again. “She called