Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [113]
“No, I have to get one.”
“Well, sure,” the woman said, “a job is real important. What kind of job are you looking for?”
“Something low stress,” Rebecca said. “It’s not that I’m lazy or anything,” she said, and then she said, “Well, maybe I am, maybe that’s true.”
“Don’t say that,” the woman said. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
She was a wonderful woman. Rebecca thought about the man in the story—he should meet this woman.
“Thank you,” Rebecca said. “That’s really nice.”
“Now, you send it back if it’s too big. It’s no problem,” the woman assured her. “No problem at all.”
The death of Rebecca’s father was not the saddest thing. Nor was the absence of her mother. The saddest thing was when she fell in love with Jace Burke at the university and he broke up with her. Jace was a piano player, and one time when her father went to a conference, she brought Jace back to Crosby for the night. Jace looked around the rectory and said, “Baby, this is one strange place.” He looked at her with a tenderness that was like a sweet erasure of all the darkness in her past. Later, they went to the Warehouse Bar and Grill, where the kind-of-crazy Angela O’Meara still played the piano in the bar. “Oh, man, she’s great,” Jace said.
“My father always lets her come to the church to play whenever she feels like it. She doesn’t have a piano,” Rebecca explained. “She never did.”
“She’s great,” Jace repeated softly, and Rebecca felt a delicious warmth toward her father then, as though her father had seen some greatness in poor half-soused Angie, too, that Rebecca had never known. When they left, Jace slipped a twenty-dollar bill into Angela’s tip jar. Angela made a kiss in their direction and played “Hello, Young Lovers” as they left the bar.
When Jace left the university, he played in bars all over Boston. Sometimes the bars were fancy places with thick carpets and leather chairs, and sometimes there’d be a poster out front with Jace’s picture on it. But a lot of times his luck was bad and he’d have to play the electric organ in strip joints just to earn some money.
Every weekend, Rebecca took a Greyhound bus and stayed with him in his dirty apartment, where there were cockroaches in the silverware drawer. On Sunday evenings when she got back, she’d call her father and tell him how hard she was studying. Later on, when she was living with David, she’d sometimes let herself remember those weekends with Jace. The dirty sheets against her skin, the way Jace’s metal chairs felt, sitting on them naked while they ate English muffins by the open window, grime all around the window casing. She’d remember standing at the dirty sink in the bathroom, naked, Jace standing behind her, naked too, seeing themselves in the mirror. There was no voice of her father’s in her head, no thoughts of men behaving like dogs. All of it was easy as pie.
One night in the bathtub, Jace told her about a blond woman he’d met. Rebecca sat with the facecloth in her hand, staring at the cracked caulking around the edge of the tub, at the dirt wedged into the cracks. These things happen, is what Jace said.
Later that week, her father called. Even now, Rebecca didn’t understand exactly what had been wrong with her father’s heart; he hadn’t said, exactly. Only that there was nothing the doctors could do. “But they can do all sorts of things, Daddy,” she said. “I mean, I hear about all kinds of heart procedures and stuff.”
“Not my heart,” he answered, and there was fear in his voice. The fear made Rebecca wonder if perhaps her father hadn’t believed all those things he’d preached for years. But even when she heard the fear in his voice, and felt the fear herself, she knew what she felt most badly about was Jace and the blonde.
“Tell me,” David said. “What’s a facecloth doing in the freezer?”
“I didn’t get the job,” Rebecca said.
“No?” David closed the freezer door. “I’m kind of surprised. I thought you would. What do they want, a Ph.D.?” He tore the end off a loaf of bread that was on the counter and stuck it into a jar of spaghetti sauce. “Poor Bicka-Beck,” he