Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [109]
“No?” the woman asked. “Some people feel that way. Some people don’t like to order things anyway. You prefer to do your shopping right there in the store. I’m like that myself.”
“Things get lost,” Rebecca told her. “There’s a lot of billing clerks and truck drivers out there. You know, all those people who could have a bad night’s sleep or a fight with their boss.” As she spoke, she flipped through the magazine, found the first page of the story—when the man had still been happy—and ripped it out slowly. Using the cigarette lighter she kept in her back pocket, Rebecca set the page on fire in the sink.
“I suppose if you think about it like that,” the woman said, agreeably. “But we guarantee delivery.”
“Oh, I trust you,” Rebecca said, and she did. What a voice that woman had—Rebecca could have told her anything. “It’s just that I’m the kind of person,” Rebecca continued, “that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn’t be a pin for me.”
The woman didn’t say anything.
“Do you ever think that?” Rebecca asked. She watched the small flame, like a little living spirit, flare up for a moment in the sink.
“No,” the woman said. “I never do.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Rebecca said.
“Don’t be sorry,” said the woman. “It’s a pleasure. We’ll do this. We’ll go with the large, and if it’s too big, you just send it on back.”
Rebecca ran water over the flakes of ashes in the sink. “Can I just ask you something?” she said to the woman.
“Well, sure,” the woman said.
“Are you a Scientologist?”
“Am I—” There was a pause. “No, I’m not,” the woman said, in her easy Southern accent.
“Me either. It’s just I happened to be reading an article about Scientology, and, boy, it sounds like pretty weird stuff.”
“I guess to each his own. Now—”
“I always talk too much,” Rebecca explained to the woman. “My boyfriend tells me that. And now I’ve given myself this headache.”
“It’s a pleasure doing business with a friendly person,” the woman said. “A cold facecloth pressed right against the eyeballs should help. And don’t be afraid to really press either.”
“Thank you,” Rebecca said. “I guess large will do.”
“Obviously you’ve got to lie right back,” the woman said. “Put the facecloth in the freezer first.”
Rebecca Brown came from a line of Congregational ministers. Her grandfather had been a much-loved pastor of a large church in Shirley Falls, and her mother had been the daughter of this Reverend Tyler Caskey’s second marriage, his first wife dying and leaving him with two small girls. By the time he had married again, and had Rebecca’s mother, the other girls were old enough to not pay much attention to her, and it wasn’t until Rebecca’s mother married a minister herself, and then left very suddenly to go to California to be an actress, that Rebecca’s aunt Katherine got involved. “It is unthinkable that a mother would take off like that,” she said, with tears in her eyes. Except it wasn’t unthinkable at all—Rebecca’s mother had done it, and had not even put up a fight when Rebecca’s father, Reverend Brown of a tiny church in Crosby, Maine, had gone to court for custody. “This is sick,” said Aunt Katherine. “He’ll spousify you. Let’s hope he gets married again soon.”
Aunt Katherine had had a lot of therapy, and Rebecca was nervous around her. In any event, her father did not remarry, and Rebecca had grown up in a solitary house owned by the church, and had known quietly and secretly, the way that children know things, that her father was not the minister her grandfather had been. “It breaks my heart,” Aunt Katherine said once, on a visit, and Rebecca hoped she wouldn’t come again. Her mother, in California, sent a postcard once in a while, but when it was discovered that she had joined the church of Scientology, even Aunt Katherine said it was better not to have much to do with her. That wasn’t hard—the postcards stopped coming.
Rebecca sent a whole bunch of letters, one after another, to her mother at the last address she had for her—in a town called Tarzana.