Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [30]
“Oh, sure. You go say your goodbyes now, so we can get going.”
“He’s married a nice woman,” Henry says, hesitating by the foot of the bed.
“Yes, I think he has.” They are silent for a moment; it is a shock, after all. Their son, their only child, married now. He is thirty-eight years old; they’d gotten pretty used to him.
They expected at one point that he would marry his office assistant, but that didn’t last very long. Then it seemed that he would marry the teacher who lived out on Turtleback Island, but that didn’t last long either. Then it happened, right out of the blue: Suzanne Bernstein, M.D., Ph.D., showed up in town for a conference and trotted around all week in a new pair of shoes. The shoes inflamed an ingrown toenail and caused a blister the size of a big marble to appear on her sole; Suzanne was telling the story all day. “I looked in the yellow pages, and by the time I got to his office, I had ruined my feet. He had to drill through a toenail. What a way to meet!”
Olive found the story stupid. Why hadn’t the girl, with all her money, simply bought a pair of shoes that fit?
However, that was how the couple met. And the rest, as Suzanne was saying all day, was history. If you call six weeks history. Because that part was surprising as well—to get married quick as a thunder-clap. “Why wait?” Suzanne said to Olive the day she and Christopher stopped by to show off the ring. Olive said agreeably, “No reason at all.”
“Still, Henry,” Olive says now. “How come a gastroenterologist? Plenty of other kinds of doctors to be, without all that poking around. You don’t like thinking about it.”
Henry looks at her in his absent way. “I know it,” he says.
Sunlight flickers on the wall and the white curtains move slightly. The smell of cigarette smoke returns. Henry and Olive are silent, gazing at the foot of the bed, until Olive says, “She’s a very positive person.”
“She’s good for Christopher,” Henry says.
They have been almost whispering, but at the sound of footsteps in the hallway, both of them turn toward the half-open door with perky, pleasant expressions on their faces. Except that Suzanne’s mother doesn’t stop; she goes right on past in her navy-blue suit, holding a pocketbook that looks like a miniature suitcase.
“You better get back out there,” Olive says. “I’ll come say my goodbyes in a minute. Just give me a second to rest.”
“Yes, you rest, Ollie.”
“How about we stop at Dunkin’ Donuts,” she says. They like to sit in the booth by the window, and there’s a waitress who knows them; she’ll say hi nicely, then leave them alone.
“We can do that,” Henry says, at the door.
Lying back against the pillows, she thinks how pale her son was standing there getting married. In his guarded Christopher way he looked gratefully at his bride, who stood, thin and small-breasted, gazing up at him. Her mother cried. It was really something—Janice Bernstein’s eyes positively streaming. Afterward she said to Olive, “Don’t you cry at weddings?”
“I don’t see any reason to cry,” Olive said.
Weeping would not have come close to what she felt. She felt fear, sitting out there on her folding chair. Fear that her heart would squeeze shut again, would stop, the way it did once before, a fist punched through her back. And she felt it, too, at the way the bride was smiling up at Christopher, as though she actually knew him. Because did she know what he looked like in first grade when he had a nosebleed in Miss Lampley’s class? Did she see him when he was a pale, slightly pudgy child, his skin broken out in hives because he was afraid to take a spelling test? No, what Suzanne was mistaking for knowing someone was knowing sex with that person for a couple of weeks. You never could have told her that, though. If Olive had told her that the nasturtiums were actually petunias (which she did not do), Dr. Sue might have said, “Well, I’ve seen nasturtiums that look just like that.” But, still, it was disconcerting how Suzanne looked at Christopher while they were getting married, as