Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [101]
The kitchen was empty. Upstairs she heard a shower running. She sat down heavily in a wooden chair. She had once known each of their six names. Now she could remember nothing but the wife’s name, Rose, and one girl—Andrea? Sean could very possibly have been one of the youngest. But how many thousands of Sean O’Caseys were wandering around, and did it even matter? As though remembering something heard about a distant relative, Olive sat in the dark kitchen and remembered a person—herself—who had once thought that if she left Henry for Jim, she’d have done anything for Jim’s children—her love had felt that huge.
“Christopher,” she said. He had stepped into the kitchen, his hair wet, dressed for work. “I think I met your tenant in the park. I didn’t know he had a dog as well as a Christian parrot.”
Chris nodded, drank from a coffee mug as he stood by the sink.
“I didn’t care for him.”
Christopher raised one eyebrow. “How surprising.”
“Didn’t think he was a bit nice. I thought Christians were supposed to be nice.”
Her son turned to put his mug into the sink. “If I had more energy, I’d laugh. But Annabelle was up again and I’m tired.”
“Christopher, what’s the story with Ann’s mother?”
He wiped a kitchen towel across the counter in one swipe. “She’s an alcoholic.”
“Oh, dear God.”
“Yeah, she’s a mess. And the father, dead now—praise God, as the parrot would say—was in the army. Made them do push-ups each morning.”
“Push-ups. Well, I can see you two have a great deal in common.”
“What do you mean?” His face seemed to flush slightly.
“I was being sarcastic. Imagine your father making you do push-ups.”
That he had no response unsettled her slightly. “Your tenant wanted to know how you afforded this place,” she said.
Chris scowled, familiar to her again. “None of his damn business.”
“No, that’s exactly what I thought.”
Christopher glanced at his watch, and she had a sudden fear of his leaving, of being left alone with Ann and those kids all day in this dark house. “How long does it take you to get to work?” she asked.
“Half hour. The subway’s packed at rush hour.”
Olive had never been on a subway. “Chris, do you worry about another attack?”
“Attack? Terrorist attack?”
Olive nodded.
“No. Sort of. Not really. I mean, it’s going to happen, so you can’t just sit around waiting.”
“No, I can see that.”
Chris ran his fingers through his wet hair, gave his head a quick shake. “There was a store on the corner here, run by guys from Pakistan. Hardly anything in the store. A few cupcakes, a bottle of Coke. Clearly some kind of front. But I’d stop in to buy the paper each morning, and the guy would be real nice. ‘How you doing today,’ he’d say, with his long yellow teeth showing. He’d give me this smile, and I’d smile back, and it was sort of understood that he had nothing against me, but if he knew which subway was going to blow, he’d smile and watch me walk to get on it.” Chris shrugged.
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t. But I do. The store closed, the guy said he had to go back to Pakistan. It was in his eyes, Mom, that’s all I’m saying.”
Olive nodded, looking at the big wooden table. “Still, you like it here?”
“Pretty much.”
But the day passed okay, and then another day passed. She took the dog to the park earlier, so as to avoid Sean. And while everything remained strange, like a foreign country, she could not let go of a certain happiness inside her; she was with her son. At times he was talkative, at times he was silent, and he was most familiar to her then. She did not understand his new life, or Ann, who said things that seemed to come from a Hallmark card, but she did not see