Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [36]
In the living room Daisy sat on the couch, crossing her plump ankles. She lit another cigarette. “How are you, Harmon?” she said. “How are the boys?” For she knew this was his sadness: His four sons had grown and scattered. They visited, appearing in town as great grown men, and she remembered when, in years past, you never saw Harmon alone. Always one or more of these small, then teenage, boys were with him, running around the hardware store on Saturdays, yelling across the parking lot, throwing a ball, calling out to their father to hurry.
“They’re good. They seem good.” Harmon sat next to her; he never sat in Copper’s old easy chair. “And you, Daisy?”
“Copper came to me in a dream last night. It didn’t seem like a dream. I could swear he came—well, from wherever he is, to visit me.” She tilted her head at him, peering through the smoke. “Does that sound crazy?”
Harmon raised a shoulder. “I don’t know as anyone’s got a corner on the market of that stuff, no matter what people say they believe, or don’t.”
Daisy nodded. “Well, he said everything was fine.”
“Everything?”
She laughed softly, her eyes squinting again as she put the cigarette to her mouth. “Everything.” Together they looked about the small, lowceilinged room, the smoke leveling above them. Once, during a summer thunderstorm, they had sat in this room while a small ball of electricity had come through the partly opened window, buzzed ludicrously around the walls, and then gone out the window again.
Daisy sat back, tugging the blue sweater over her large, soft stomach. “No need to tell anyone I saw him like that.”
“No.”
“You’re a good friend to me, Harmon.”
He said nothing, ran his hand over the couch cushion.
“Say, Kathleen Burnham’s cousin is in town with his girlfriend. I saw them drive by.”
“They were just at the marina.” He told how the girl had put her head down on the table. How she had said to the fellow, Stop smelling me.
“Oh, sweet.” Daisy laughed softly again.
“God, I love young people,” Harmon said. “They get griped about enough. People like to think the younger generation’s job is to steer the world to hell. But it’s never true, is it? They’re hopeful and good—and that’s how it should be.”
Daisy kept smiling. “Everything you say is true.” She took a final drag on her cigarette, leaned forward to squish it out. She had told him once how she’d thought with Copper she was pregnant, how happy they’d been—but it wasn’t to be. She wasn’t going to mention this again. Instead she put her hand over his, feeling the thickness of his knuckles.
In a moment they both stood, and climbed the narrow staircase to the little room where sunlight shone through the window, making a red glass vase on the bureau glow.
“I take it you had to wait.” Bonnie was ripping long strips of dark green wool. A soft pile of these strips lay at her feet, the late morning sun making a pattern across the pine floor from the small-paned window she sat near.
“I wish you’d come. The water’s beautiful. Calm, flat. But it’s picking up now.”
“I guess I can see the bay from here.” She had not looked up. Her fingers were long. Her plain gold band, loose behind the knuckle, caught the sun with each rip. “I suppose it’s mostly out-of-staters making you wait.”
“No.” Harmon sat down in the La-Z-Boy that looked out over the water. He thought of the young couple. “Maybe. Mostly, it was the usual.”
“Did you bring me back a doughnut?”
He sat forward. “Oh, gosh. Gosh, no. I left it there. I’ll go back, Bonnie.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“I will.”
“Sit down.”
He had not stood up, but had been ready, with his hands on the chair’s arms, his knees bent. He hesitated, sat back. He picked up a Newsweek magazine on the small table beside the chair.
“Would’ve been