Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [120]
“Maybe. We’ll see. Got our hands full, but sure, we’d like to. We’ll see.”
“How long has he been walking?”
“Since last week. Held on to the couch, smiled, then took right off. Three full steps before he fell down.”
You would think a child had never walked before any place on the earth, to hear Christopher’s voice.
“How are you, Mom?” His happiness had made him nicer.
“You know. The same. Do you remember Jack Kennison?”
“No.”
“Oh, he’s a big flub-dub whose wife died in December. Sad. We’re having supper next week and Bunny called it a date. What a stupid thing to say. Honestly, that irritated me.”
“Have dinner with him. Consider it volunteer work or something.”
“Yes,” Olive said. “You’re exactly right.”
The evenings were long this time of year, and Jack suggested they meet at the Painted Rudder at six thirty. “Should be a nice time of day, right there on the water,” he said, and Olive agreed, although she was distressed about the time. For most of her life, she had eaten supper at five o’clock, and that he didn’t (apparently) reminded her he was someone about whom she knew nothing, and probably didn’t care to either. She had never liked him from the start, and it was foolish to have agreed to dinner.
He ordered a vodka and tonic, and she didn’t like that. “Water, please,” she said firmly to the waitress, who nodded and backed away. They were sitting kitty-corner to each other, at a table for four, so that they could both see the cove with the sailboats and the lobster boats, and the buoys bobbing just slightly in the evening’s breeze. He seemed much too close to her, his big hairy arm draping down to his drink. “I know Henry was in the nursing home for a long time, Olive.” He looked at her with his very blue eyes. “That had to be hard.”
So they talked like that, and it was kind of nice. They both needed someone to talk to, someone to listen, and they did that. They listened. Talked. Listened more. He never mentioned Harvard. The sun was setting behind the boats as they sat with their decaf coffees.
The next week they met for lunch at a small place near the river. Maybe because it was daytime, the spring sunshine full on the grass outside, the parked cars seen through the window reflecting shards of brightness—maybe the midday-ness of it made it not as lovely as the time before. Jack seemed tired, his shirt pressed and expensive-looking; Olive felt big and baggy inside her long vest that she had made from an old set of curtains. “Did your wife sew?” she asked.
“Sew?” As though he didn’t know what the word meant.
“Sew. Make things from cloth.”
“Oh. No.”
But when she said that she and Henry had built their house themselves, he said he’d like to see it. “Fine,” she said. “Follow along behind.” She watched in the rearview mirror as his red car moved along behind hers; he parked so poorly he almost ruined a young birch tree. She heard his steps behind her on the steep walkway. She felt like a whale, imagining her large back from his eyes.
“It’s nice, Olive,” he said, ducking his head, although there was plenty of room for him to stand up straight. She showed him the “bump-out room,” where you could lie and see the side garden through all the glass. She showed him the library built the year before Henry’s stroke, with its cathedral ceiling and skylights. He looked at the books, and she wanted to say, “Stop that,” as though he were reading her diary.
“He’s like a child,” she told Bunny. “He touches everything. Honest to God, he picked up my wooden seagull, turned it around, put it back in the wrong place, then picked up the clay vase Christopher gave us one year, and turned that over. What was he looking for, a price?”
Bunny said, “I think you’re being a little hard on him, Olive.