Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [17]
“I’m not in New York.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not—I’m not in New York anymore.”
He could hear that she was about to ask something; he thought he could almost feel her desire to turn around and look at the backseat, see what was in his car. If she did, he would have to say he needed to go, ask her to leave. He watched from the corner of his eye, but she was still looking straight ahead.
Patty Howe, he saw, had shears in her hand. With her skirt blowing about her, she was standing by the rugosa, cutting some of the white blossoms. He kept his eye on Patty, the choppy bay spread out behind her. “How’d he do it?” He rubbed his hand over his thigh.
“My father? Shot himself.”
The moored sailboats now were heaving their bows high, then swooping back down as though pulled by an angry underwater creature. The white blossoms of the wild rugosa bent, straightened, bent again, the scraggly leaves around them bobbing as though they too were an ocean. He saw Patty Howe step back from them, and give her hand a shake, as though she had been pricked by the thorns.
“No note,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Oh, Mother had such a hard time with that no-note business. She thought the least he could’ve done was leave a note, the way he did if he’d walked to the grocery store. Mother would say, ‘He was always considerate enough to leave me a note when he went anywhere.’ But he hadn’t really gone anywhere. He was there in the kitchen, poor thing.”
“Do these boats ever get loose?” Kevin pictured his own childhood kitchen. He knew that a .22 caliber bullet could travel for one mile, go through nine inches of ordinary board. But after the roof of a mouth, the roof of a house—after that, how far did it go?
“Oh, sometimes. Not so much as you’d think, given how fierce these squalls can be. But every so often one does, you know—causes a ruckus. They have to go after it, hope it doesn’t smash up on the rocks.”
“Then the marina gets sued for malpractice?” He said this to divert her.
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, “how they handle that kind of thing. Different insurance arrangements, I guess. Acts of negligence or acts of God.”
At the very moment Kevin became aware of liking the sound of her voice, he felt adrenaline pour through him, the familiar, awful intensity, the indefatigable system that wanted to endure. He squinted hard toward the ocean. Great gray clouds were blowing in, and yet the sun, as though in contest, streamed yellow rays beneath them so that parts of the water sparkled with frenzied gaiety.
“Unusual for a woman to use a gun,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, musingly.
He looked at her; she did not return the look, just gazed out at the swirling incoming tide. “Well, my mother was an unusual woman,” he said grimly.
“Yes,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “She was.”
When Patty Howe had gotten done with her shift, taken her apron off, and gone to hang it in the back room, she had seen through the dusty window the yellow daylilies that grew in the small patch of lawn on the far side of the marina. She pictured them in a jar next to her bed. “I’m disappointed too,” her husband had said, the second time, adding, “but I know it must feel like it happens just to you.” Her eyes moistened now, remembering this; a great swelling of love filled her. The lilies would not be missed. No one went to the far side of the marina, partly because the path that ran right in front was so narrow, the drop-off so steep. For insurance purposes the place had recently posted a KEEP OUT sign, and there was even talk of fencing it off before some small child, unwatched, scrambled off into the brush there. But Patty would just snip a few lilies and get going. She found the shears in a drawer and went out to get her bouquet, noticing when she stepped out that Mrs. Kitteridge had joined Kevin Coulson in the car, and it gave her a feeling of safety, having Mrs. Kitteridge with him. She couldn’t have said why, and didn’t dwell on it. The wind had picked up amazingly. She’d hurry and get her flowers, wrap them in a wet paper towel, and stop off by her mother’s on