Sing You Home Read Online Free Page B

Or I’ll hear the phone ring and I know it’s you before I even pick up.”
    “I used to be able to predict rain when I was pregnant with you,” my mother says. “I was more accurate than the weatherman on the ABC news.”
    I dip my finger into the hummus. “When I woke up this morning, the whole bedroom smelled like eggplant parmigiana—you know, the really good kind that they make at Bolonisi’s?”
    “That’s where the shower’s being held!” she gasps, amazed. “When did all this start?”
    “About the same time I found a Kinko’s receipt for the invitations in Max’s jacket.”
    It takes my mother a moment, and then she starts to laugh. “And here I was planning the cruise I was going to take after I won the lottery with your number picks.”
    “Sorry to disappoint you.”
    She rubs her hand over my belly. “Zoe,” my mother says, “you couldn’t if you tried.”
    Some cognitive scientists believe human response to music provides evidence that we are more than just flesh and blood—that we also have souls. Their thinking is as follows:
    All reactions to external stimuli can be traced back to an evolutionary rationale. You pull your hand away from fire to avoid physical harm. You get butterflies before an important speech because the adrenaline running through your veins has caused a physiological fight-or-flight response. But there is no evolutionary context within which people’s response to music makes sense—the tapping of a foot, the urge to sing along or get up and dance, there’s just no survival benefit to these activities. For this reason, some believe that our response to music is proof that there’s more to us than just biological and physiological mechanics—that the only way to be moved by the spirit, so to speak, is to have one in the first place.
    There are games. Estimate Zoe’s Belly Size, a purse scavenger hunt (who would have guessed that my mother had an overdue utility bill in her bag?), a baby-sock-matching relay, and, now, a particularly disgusting foray in which baby diapers filled with melted chocolate are passed around for identification by candy bar brand.
    Even though this isn’t really my cup of tea, I play along. My part-time bookkeeper, Alexa, has organized the whole event—and has even gone to the trouble of rounding up guests: my mother, my cousin Isobel, Wanda from Shady Acres and another nurse from the burn unit of the hospital where I work, and a school counselor named Vanessa who contracted me to do music therapy earlier this year with a profoundly autistic ninth grader.
    It’s sort of depressing that these women, acquaintances at best, are being substituted for close friends. Then again, if I’m not working, I’m with Max. And Max would rather be run over by his own lawn-mowing machines than identify chocolate feces in a diaper. For this reason alone, he is really the only friend I need.
    I watch Wanda peer into the Pampers. “Snickers?” she guesses incorrectly.
    Vanessa gets the diaper next. She’s tall, with short platinum blond hair and piercingly blue eyes. The first time I met her she invited me into her office and gave me a blistering lecture on how the SATs were a conspiracy by the College Board to take over the world eighty dollars at a time. Well? she said when she finally stopped for a breath. What do you have to say for yourself?
    I’m the new music therapist, I told her.
    She blinked at me, and then looked down at her calendar and flipped the page backward. Ah, she said. Guess the rep from Kaplan is coming tomorrow.
    Vanessa doesn’t even glance down at the diaper. “They look like Mounds to me,” she says drily. “Two, to be exact.”
    I burst out laughing, but I’m the only one who seems to get Vanessa’s joke. Alexa looks devastated because her party games aren’t being taken seriously. My mother intervenes, collecting the diaper from Vanessa’s place mat. “How about Name That Baby?” she suggests.
    I feel a twinge in my