Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [24]
When she finished, she did something that really surprised her. Later she had to wonder how long she had been planning this without quite knowing. The way she didn’t quite allow herself to know when Malcolm had stopped saying “I think about you all the time.”
Angie took a break.
Delicately, she pressed the cocktail napkin to her lips, slipped out from behind the piano, and walked toward the restroom, where there was a pay phone. She did not want to bother Joe for her pocketbook.
“Darling,” she said quietly to Walter, “do you have some change?”
He stretched out a leg, reached into his pocket, handed her the coins. “You’re the candy shop, Angie,” Walter said slurringly.
His hand was moist; even the coins felt moist. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she said.
She went to the phone and dialed Malcolm’s number. Not once, in twenty-two years, had she called him at home, although she had memorized his number long ago. Twenty-two years, she thought, as she listened to the buzz of the ring, would be considered a very long time by most people, but for Angie time was as big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense of it was like trying to make sense of music and God and why the ocean was deep. Long ago Angie had known not to try to make sense of these things, the way other people tried to do.
Malcolm answered the phone. And here was a curious thing—she didn’t like the sound of his voice. “Malcolm,” she said softly. “I can’t see you anymore. I’m so terribly sorry, but I can’t do this anymore.”
Silence. His wife was probably right there. “Bye, now,” she said.
On her way past Walter, she said, “Thank you, darling,” and he said, “Anything for you, Angie.” Walter’s voice was thick with drunkenness, his face glistening.
She played the song Simon wanted then, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” but it wasn’t until she was almost through that she allowed herself to look at him. He did not return her smile, and a flush went through her.
She smiled at the Christmas tree. The colored lights seemed terribly bright, and for a moment she felt baffled that people did this to trees—decorated them with all that glitter; some people looked forward to this all year. And then another flush of heat rose through her, to think how in a few weeks the tree would be stripped, taken down, hauled out onto the sidewalk with tinsel still sticking to it; she could picture how awkward this tree would look, perched sideways on the snow, its chopped little trunk sticking at an angle in the air.
She began to play “We Shall Overcome,” but somebody from the bar called out, “Hey, a little serious there, Angie,” and so she smiled even more brightly and played ragtime instead. Stupid to play that—to play “We Shall Overcome.” Simon would think it was stupid, she realized that now. “You’re so schmaltzy,” he used to say.
But he had said other things. When he took her to lunch with her mother that first time: “You’re like a person in a beautiful fairy tale,” he had said, sunlight falling across the table on the deck.
“You’re the perfect daughter,” he had said, out in the rowboat in the bay, her mother waving from the rocks. “You have the face of an angel,” he said the day they stepped from the boat onto Puckerbrush Island. Later he sent her one white rose.
Oh, she had been just a girl. She had come into this very bar with her friends one night that summer, and there he was playing “Fly Me to the Moon.” It was like he’d had little lights flickering off him.
A nervous fellow, though, Simon had been, his whole body jerking around like a puppet pulled by strings. A lot of force in his playing. But it lacked—well, deep in her heart she had known even then that his playing lacked—well,