Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [15]
Mrs. Kitteridge. Holy shit. She looked exactly the same as she had in the classroom in seventh grade, that forthright, high-cheekboned expression; her hair was still dark. He had liked her; not everyone had. He would have waved her away now, or started the car, but the memory of respect held him back. She rapped her hand on the glass, and after hesitating, he leaned and unrolled the window the rest of the way.
“Kevin Coulson. Hello.”
He nodded.
“You going to invite me to sit in your car?”
His hands made fists in his lap. He started to shake his head. “No, I’m only—”
But she had already let herself in—a big woman, taking up the whole bucket seat, her knees close to the dashboard. She hauled a big black handbag across her lap. “What brings you here?” she asked.
He looked out toward the water. The young woman was moving back up from the dock; the seagulls were screeching furiously behind her, beating their large wings and darting down; she’d have been throwing out clamshells, most likely.
“Visiting?” Mrs. Kitteridge prompted. “From New York City? Isn’t that where you live now?”
“Jesus,” Kevin said quietly. “Does everybody know everything?”
“Oh, sure,” she said comfortably. “What else is there to do?”
She had her face turned to him, but he didn’t want to meet her eyes. The wind on the bay seemed to be picking up more. He put his hands into his pockets, so as not to suck on his knuckles.
“Get a lot of tourists now,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Crawling all over the place this time of year.”
He made a sound in his throat, acknowledging not the fact—what did he care?—but that she had spoken to him. He watched the slim woman with the pail, her head tilted down as she went back inside, closing the screen door carefully. “That’s Patty Howe,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Remember her? Patty Crane. She married the older Howe boy. Nice girl. She keeps having miscarriages and it makes her sad.”
Olive Kitteridge sighed, rearranged her feet, pushed the lever—much to Kevin’s surprise—to make herself more comfortable, moving the seat back. “I suspect they’ll get her fixed up one of these days, and then she’ll be pregnant with triplets.”
Kevin took his hands from his pockets, cracked his knuckles. “Patty was nice,” he said. “I had forgotten about Patty.”
“She’s still nice. That’s what I said. What are you doing in New York?”
“Oh.” He raised a hand, saw the reddened marks that spotted them, crossed his arms. “I’m in training. I got my medical degree four years ago.”
“Say, that’s impressive. What kind of doctor are you training to be?”
He looked at the dashboard, couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed the filth of it. There in the sunlight it seemed to be telling her he was a slob, pathetic, not a shred of dignity. He took in a breath and said, “Psychiatry.”
He expected her to say “Ahhh…” and when she said nothing, he glanced at her, and found that she was giving a simple matter-of-fact nod.
“It’s beautiful here,” he said, squinting back toward the bay. The remark held gratitude for what he felt was her discretion, and it was true, as well, for the bay—which he seemed to view from behind a large pane of glass, larger than the windshield—and which did have, he understood, a kind of splendor, the twanging, rocking sailboats, the whipped water, the wild rugosa. How much better to be a fisherman, to spend one’s day in the midst of this. He thought of the PET scans he had studied, always looking for his mother, hands in his pockets, nodding as the radiologists spoke, and sometimes tears twinkling behind his lids—the enlargement of the amygdala, the increase in the white-matter lesions, the severe depletion in the number of glial cells. The brains of the bipolar.
“But I’m not going to be a psychiatrist,” he said.
The wind was really picking up now, making the ramp to the float bob up and down. “I imagine you get a lot of wicky-wackies in that business,” Mrs. Kitteridge said,