Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [28]
The inside door of her son’s bedroom is partly open, and voices and sounds make their way from the front of the house, where the party is also going on: high heels clicking down the hallway, a bathroom door pushed aggressively shut. (Honestly, Olive thinks—why not just close a door nicely?) A chair in the living room gets scraped over the floor, and in there with the muted laughter and talk is the odor of coffee, and the thick, sweet smell of baked goods, which is the way the streets near the Nissen bread factory used to smell before it closed down. There are different perfumes as well, including one that all day has smelled to Olive like that bug spray Off! All these smells have managed to move down the hall and drift into the bedroom.
Cigarette smoke, too. Olive opens her eyes: Someone is smoking a cigarette in the back garden. Through the open window she hears a cough, the click of a lighter. Really, the place has been overrun. She pictures heavy shoes stepping through the gladiola bed, and then, hearing a toilet flush down the hall, she has a momentary image of the house collapsing; pipes breaking, floorboards snapping, walls folding over. She sits up slightly, rearranges herself, and puts another pillow against the headboard.
She built the house herself—well, almost. She and Henry, years ago, did all the design and then worked closely with the builder, so that Chris would have a decent place to live when he came back from podiatry school. When you build a house yourself, you’re going to have a different feeling about it than other people do. Olive is used to this because she has always liked to make things: dresses, gardens, houses. (The yellow roses were arranged in their baskets by her this morning, before the sun was up.) Her own house, a few miles down the road, she and Henry also built, years ago, and just recently she fired the cleaning woman because of the way the foolish girl dragged the vacuum cleaner across the floor, banging it into walls and bumping it down the stairs.
At least Christopher appreciates this place. Over the last few years, the three of them, Olive and Henry and Christopher, have taken care of it together, clearing more woods, planting lilacs and rhododendrons, digging postholes for the fence. Now Suzanne (Dr. Sue is what Olive calls her in her head) will take over, and coming from money the way she does, she will probably hire a housekeeper, as well as a gardener. (“Love your pretty nasturtiums,” Dr. Sue said to Olive a few weeks ago, pointing to the petunia rows.) But never mind, Olive thinks now. You move aside and make way for the new.
Through her closed eyelids Olive sees a red light slanting through the windows; she can feel sunlight warming her calves and ankles on the bed, can feel beneath her hand how it warms the soft fabric of her dress, which really did come out nicely. It pleases her to think of the piece of blueberry cake she managed to slip into her big leather handbag—how she can go home soon and eat it in peace, take off this panty girdle, get things back to normal.
Olive senses someone in the room, and opens her eyes. A small child stands staring from the doorway; one of the bride’s little nieces from Chicago. It’s the one who was supposed to sprinkle rose petals on the ground right before the ceremony but at the last minute decided she didn’t want to, and hung back, sulking. Dr. Sue was nice about it, though, speaking reassuringly to the little girl, cupping her hand gently around the child’s head. Finally Suzanne called out good-naturedly