Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [123]
“That’s it,” said Olive. She began walking, at her pace now. She said over her shoulder, “At least I’m not prejudiced against homosexuals.”
“No,” he called. “Just white men with money.”
Damn right, she thought.
She called Bunny, and Bunny—Olive couldn’t believe this—actually laughed. “Oh, Olive,” she said. “Does it really matter?”
“Matter that someone voted for a man who is lying to the country? Bunny, for God’s sake, this world is a mess.”
“That’s true enough,” Bunny said. “But the world has always been a mess. I think if you enjoy his company, you should just let it go.”
“I don’t enjoy his company,” Olive said, and hung up. She’d never realized Bunny was an idiot, but there you were.
It was terrible, though, when you couldn’t tell people things. Olive felt this keenly as the days went by. She called Christopher. “He’s a Republican,” she said.
“Well, that’s gross,” Christopher answered. Then: “I thought you were calling to see how your grandson is.”
“Of course I wonder how he is. I wish you’d call me to tell me how he is.” Where and how, exactly, this rupture with her son had taken place, Olive couldn’t have said.
“I do call you, Mom.” A long pause. “But—”
“But what?”
“Well, it’s a little hard to converse with you.”
“I see. Everything is my fault.”
“No. Everything is someone else’s fault; that’s my point.”
It had to be her son’s therapist who was responsible for all this. Who would ever have expected this? She said into the phone, “Not I, said the Little Red Hen.”
“What?”
She hung up.
Two weeks passed by. She walked along the river earlier than six, so she wouldn’t bump into Jack, and because she woke after just a few hours’ sleep. The spring was gorgeous, and seemed an assault. Starflowers popped through the pine needles, clusters of purple violets were there by the granite seat. She passed the elderly couple, who were holding hands again. After that, she stopped her walking. For a few days she stayed in bed, which—to her memory—she had never done before. She was not a lie-er downer.
Christopher didn’t call, Bunny didn’t call. Jack Kennison didn’t call.
One night she woke at midnight. She turned on her computer, and typed in Jack’s e-mail address, which she had gotten back when they were having lunch and going into Portland for concerts.
“Does your daughter hate you?” she wrote.
In the morning was the simple “Yes.”
She waited two days. The she wrote: “My son hates me, too.”
An hour later came the response. “Does it kill you? It kills me that my daughter hates me. But I know it’s my fault.”
She wrote immediately. “It kills me. Like the devil. And it must be my fault, too, though I don’t understand it. I don’t remember things the way he seems to remember them. He sees a psychiatrist named Arthur, and I think Arthur has done this.” She paused a long time, clicked on Send, then immediately wrote, “P.S. But it has to be my fault, too. Henry said I never apologized for anything, ever, and maybe he was right.” She clicked on Send. Then she wrote: “P.S. AGAIN. He was right.”
There was no reply to this, and she felt like a schoolgirl whose crush had walked off with a different girl. In fact, Jack probably did have a different girl, or woman. Old woman. Plenty of them around—Republicans, too. She lay on the bed in the little bump-out room and listened to the transistor radio she held to her ear. Then she got up and went outside, taking the dog for a walk on a leash, because if he was loose, he’d eat one of the Moodys’ cats; this had happened before.
When she came back, the sun was just past its peak, and it was a bad time of day for her; it’d be better when it got dark. How she had loved the long evenings of spring when she was young, and all of life stretched before her. She was looking through the cupboard for a Milk-Bone for the dog when she heard her phone message machine beep. It was ludicrous, how hopeful she was that Bunny or Chris had called. Jack Kennison’s voice said, “Olive. Could you come over?”
She brushed her teeth, left the dog in his pen.
His shiny red car was in his small driveway.