Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [39]
“It does, I guess.” It was hard for Harmon to remember the emotions of his first years of marriage. “Say, listen, Kev. Are you smoking pot?”
Kevin laughed through the phone. It was, to Harmon’s ear, a healthy sound, straightforward, relaxed. “Jesus, Dad. What’s gotten into you?”
“I wondered, is all. Couple of kids have moved into the Washburn place. People are afraid they’re potheads.”
“Weed makes me antisocial,” Kevin said. “Makes me turn my face to the wall. So no, I don’t smoke it anymore.”
“Let me ask you something,” Harmon said. “And don’t tell your mother, for Christ’s sake. But these kids came in the store yesterday, they were talking, casual, you know, and they mentioned ‘fuck buddies.’ You heard of that?”
“You’re kind of surprising me here, Dad. What’s going on?”
“I know, I know.” Harmon waved a hand. “I just hate getting old, one of those old people that don’t know anything about young people. So I thought I’d ask.”
“Fuck buddies. Yeah. That’s a thing these days. Just what it says. People who get together to get laid. No strings attached.”
“I see.” Now Harmon didn’t know what more to say.
“I gotta go, Dad. But listen, stay cool. You’re cool, Dad. You’re not an old fart, don’t worry about that.”
“All right,” Harmon said, and after he hung up, he stared out the window for a long time.
“That’s fine, honestly,” Daisy said when he called her the next morning. “I mean it, Harmon.” He could hear her smoking as they spoke. “You’re not to worry,” she said.
Within fifteen minutes, she called back. He had a customer in the store, but Daisy said, “Say, listen. Why don’t you stop by anyway and we’ll just talk. Talk.”
“All right,” he said. Cliff Mott brought the snow shovel up to the register. Cliff Mott, who had heart disease, and could go any minute. “All set, then,” Harmon said, handing the man his change.
Harmon still did not sit in Copper’s chair; he sat on the couch beside Daisy, and once or twice they might briefly touch hands. Otherwise, they did what she had suggested—talked. He told her of trips to his grandmother’s house, the way her pantry smelled of ammonia, the homesickness he had felt. “I was small, see,” he said to the responsive face of Daisy. “And I understood it was meant to be fun. That was the idea, you see. But I couldn’t tell anyone it wasn’t fun.”
“Oh, Harmon,” said Daisy, her eyes moistening. “Yes. I know what you mean.”
She told him about the morning she took a pear from the front yard of Mrs. Kettleworth, and her mother made her take it back, how embarrassed she’d been. He told about finding the quarter in the mud puddle. She told of going to her first high school dance, wearing a dress of her mother’s, and the only person who asked her to dance was the principal.
“I’d have asked you,” Harmon said.
She told him her favorite song was “Whenever I Feel Afraid,” and she sang it to him softly, her blue eyes sparkling with warmth. He said the first time he heard Elvis on the radio singing “Fools Rush In,” it made him feel like he and Elvis were friends.
Walking back to his car at the marina on those mornings, he was sometimes surprised to feel that the earth was altered, the crisp air a nice thing to move through, the rustle of the oak leaves like a murmuring friend. For the first time in years he thought about God, who seemed a piggy bank Harmon had stuck up on a shelf and had now brought down to look at with a new considering eye. He wondered if this was what kids felt like when they smoked pot, or took that drug ecstasy.
One Monday in October, there was an article in the local paper saying arrests had been made at the Washburn residence. Police broke up a party where marijuana was found growing in pots along a windowsill. Harmon perused the paper carefully, finding the name Timothy Burnham, and his “girlfriend, Nina White,” who had the extra charge of assaulting a police officer.
Harmon couldn’t imagine the girl with the cinnamon hair and skinny legs assaulting a police officer. He pondered this as he moved around