Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [12]
“You’re looking fresh as a daisy,” he tells Daisy Foster in the parking lot outside the church. It is their joke; he has said it to her for years.
“How’s Olive?” Daisy’s blue eyes are still large and lovely, her smile ever present.
“Olive’s fine. Home keeping the fires burning. And what’s new with you?”
“I have a beau.” She says this quietly, putting a hand to her mouth.
“Do you? Daisy, that’s wonderful.”
“Sells insurance in Heathwick during the day, and takes me dancing on Friday nights.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Henry says again. “You’ll have to bring him around for supper.”
“Why do you need everyone married?” Christopher has said to him angrily, when Henry has asked about his son’s life. “Why can’t you just leave people alone?”
He doesn’t want people alone.
At home, Olive nods to the table, where a card from Denise lies next to an African violet. “Came yesterday,” Olive says. “I forgot.”
Henry sits down heavily and opens it with his pen, finds his glasses, peers at it. Her note is longer than usual. She had a scare late in the summer. Pericardial effusion, which turned out to be nothing. “It changed me,” she wrote, “as experiences do. It put all my priorities straight, and I have lived every day since then with the deepest gratitude for my family. Nothing matters except family and friends,” she wrote, in her neat, small hand. “And I have been blessed with both.”
The card, for the first time ever, was signed, “Love.”
“How is she?” asks Olive, running water into the sink. Henry stares out at the bay, at the skinny spruce trees along the edge of the cove, and it seems beautiful to him, God’s magnificence there in the quiet stateliness of the coastline and the slightly rocking water.
“She’s fine,” he answers. Not at the moment, but soon, he will walk over to Olive and put his hand on her arm. Olive, who has lived through her own sorrows. For he understood long ago—after Jim O’Casey’s car went off the road, and Olive spent weeks going straight to bed after supper, sobbing harshly into a pillow—Henry understood then that Olive had loved Jim O’Casey, had possibly been loved by him, though Henry never asked her and she never told, just as he did not tell her of the gripping, sickening need he felt for Denise until the day she came to him to report Jerry’s proposal, and he said: “Go.”
He puts the card on the windowsill. He has wondered what it has felt like for her to write the words Dear Henry. Has she known other Henrys since then? He has no way of knowing. Nor does he know what happened to Tony Kuzio, or whether candles are still being lit for Henry Thibodeau in church.
Henry stands up, Daisy Foster fleeting through his mind, her smile as she spoke of going dancing. The relief that he just felt over Denise’s note, that she is glad for the life that unfolded before her, gives way suddenly, queerly, into an odd sense of loss, as if something significant has been taken from him. “Olive,” he says.
She must not hear him because of the water running into the sink. She is not as tall as she used to be, and is broader across her back. The water stops. “Olive,” he says, and she turns. “You’re not going to leave me, are you?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Henry. You could make a woman sick.” She wipes her hands quickly on a towel.
He nods. How could he ever tell her—he could not—that all these years of feeling guilty about Denise have carried with them the kernel of still having her? He cannot even bear this thought, and in a moment it will be gone, dismissed as not true. For who could bear to think of himself this way, as a man deflated by the good fortune of others? No, such a thing is ludicrous.
“Daisy has a fellow,” he says. “We need to have them