Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [25]
He had come up from Boston just for the summer but stayed two years. When he broke it off with Angie, he said, “It’s like I have to date both you and your mother. It gives me the creeps.” Later, he wrote to her. “You’re neurotic,” he wrote. “You’re wounded.”
She couldn’t use the pedal; her leg was shaking beneath her black skirt. He was the only person she’d ever told that her mother had taken money from men.
A burst of laughter came from the bar and Angie looked over, but it was just some of the fishermen telling stories with Joe. Walter Dalton smiled sweetly at her, rolled his eyes toward the fishermen.
Her mother had knit the three of them matching blue sweaters for Christmas. When her mother left the room, Simon said, “We will never wear these at the same time.” Her mother bought him a whole stack of Beethoven records. When Simon left, her mother wrote and asked him for the records back, but he didn’t send them. Her mother said they could still wear the blue sweaters, and when her mother wore the blue sweater, she had Angie wear hers as well. Her mother said to her one day, “Simon got rejected from music school, you know. He’s a real estate lawyer in Boston. Bob Beane bumped into him down there.”
“Okay,” Angie had said.
She thought, then, she wouldn’t see him again. Because she had seen a shadow of envy flicker darkly over his face the day she’d told him (oh, she had told him everything, child that she was in that shack with her mother!) how once, when she was fifteen, a man from Chicago had heard her play at a local wedding. He ran a music school and had talked with her mother for two days. Angie should be at the school. There would be a scholarship, room and board. No, Angie’s mother had said. She’s Mommy’s girl. But for years Angie had pictured the place: a white, sprawling place where young people played the piano all day. She would be taught by kind men and women; she would learn to read music. All the rooms would be heated. There would be none of the sounds that came from her mother’s room, sounds that made her push her hands to her ears at night, sounds that made her leave the house and go to the church to play the piano. But no, Angie’s mother had decided. She was Mommy’s girl.
She glanced again at Simon. He was leaning back in his chair watching her. There was no pocket of warmth, the way there was whenever Henry Kitteridge walked through the door, or the way there was right now at the bar where Walter sat.
What was it he had come to see? She pictured him leaving a law office early, driving up the coast in the dark. Perhaps he was divorced; having the kind of crisis men often had in their late fifties, looking back over their lives, wondering why things had worked out the way they had. And so he—after how many years—had thought, or not thought, of her, but for some reason had driven to Crosby, Maine. Had he known she would be working here?
From the corner of her eye she saw him rise, and there he was leaning against the open baby grand, looking straight at her. He had lost most of his hair.
“Hello, Simon,” she said. She was playing stuff she’d made up now, her fingers going over the keys.
“Hello, Angie.” He wasn’t a man you’d look twice at now. Probably back then he wasn’t a man you’d have looked twice at, but that didn’t matter the way people thought it did. It didn’t matter how once he’d had an ugly brown leather jacket and thought it was cool. You couldn’t make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn’t go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind. She was slipping into the music now.
“How are you, Simon,” she said, smiling.
“Very well, thanks.” He gave a small nod. “Quite well.” And then she felt the ping of danger. His eyes were not warm. They had been warm eyes. “I see you still have your