Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [119]
“No,” he said, with what Olive thought was a small sound of puzzlement.
“She might want to know you weren’t feeling well.”
“I don’t see any reason to bother her,” he said.
“All right, then.” Olive looked around the kitchen, its emptiness and silence. “Goodbye.” She went into the next room and lay down, holding her transistor radio to her ear.
A week passed. Olive was aware on her early-morning walks by the river that the time spent in the waiting room while Jack Kennison saw the doctor had, for one brief moment, put her back into life. And now she was out of life again. It was a conundrum. In the time since Henry had died, she had tried many things. She had become a docent at the art museum in Portland, but after a few months, she found she could hardly endure the four hours required for her to be in one place. She had volunteered at the hospital, but she could not bear wearing the pink coat and arranging dead flowers while the nurses brushed past her. She had volunteered to speak English to young foreigners at the college, who needed simple practice with the language. That had been the best, but it was not enough.
Back and forth she went each morning by the river, spring arriving once again; foolish, foolish spring, breaking open its tiny buds, and what she couldn’t stand was how—for many years, really—she had been made happy by such a thing. She had not thought she would ever become immune to the beauty of the physical world, but there you were. The river sparkled with the sun that rose, enough that she needed her sunglasses.
Around the little bend in the path, there was the stone bench. Jack Kennison sat on it, watching her approach.
“Hello,” said Olive. “Trying again?”
“All the tests came back,” said Jack. He shrugged. “Nothing wrong with me, so I thought I’d get back on the horse, as they say. Yes, I’m trying again.”
“Admirable. Are you coming or going?” The idea of walking two miles with him, and then three miles back to the car, unnerved her.
“Going. Going back.”
She hadn’t noticed his red, shiny car in the parking lot when she’d started out.
“Did you drive here?” she asked.
“Yes, of course. I’ve not yet learned to fly.”
He was not wearing dark glasses, and she saw how his eyes searched for hers. She did not take her sunglasses off.
“That was a joke,” he said.
“I understand that,” she responded. “Fly away, fly away, fly away home.”
With his open palm, he touched the stone slab he sat on. “You don’t rest?”
“Nope, I just keep on going.”
He nodded. “All right, then. Enjoy your walk.”
She started to move past him, and turned. “Do you feel all right? Did you sit down because you got tired?”
“I sat down because I felt like it.”
She waved a hand above her head, and kept going. She noticed nothing on the rest of the walk, not the sun, not the river, not the asphalt path, not any opening buds. She walked and thought of Jack Kennison without the wife, who’d been the friendly one. He’d said he was in hell, and of course he would be.
When she got back to the house, she telephoned him. “Would you like to go to lunch one day?”
“I’d like to go to dinner,” he said. “It would give me something to look forward to. If I go to lunch, then I still have the rest of the day.”
“All right.” She didn’t tell him she went to bed with the sun, that to have an actual dinner in a restaurant would be, for her, like staying up way past midnight.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” said Bunny. “Olive, you’ve got a date.”
“Why would you say something so foolish?” Olive asked, really annoyed. “We’re two lonely people having supper.”
“Exactly,” said Bunny. “That’s a date.”
Funny how much that irritated Olive. And she didn’t have Bunny to tell it to, since Bunny was the one who’d said it. She called her son, who lived in New York. She asked how the baby was.
“He’s great,” Christopher said. “He’s walking.”
“You didn’t tell me he was walking.”
“Yuh, he’s walking.”
Immediately a sweat broke out on her—she felt it on her face, beneath her arms. It was almost like being told Henry had died, how the nursing home hadn’t called