Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [45]
“Is that my favorite song? I didn’t know.”
“Isn’t it?”
Bonnie shrugged, put her glasses back on, looked at her book. “ ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.’ Last time I checked, that was yours.”
When would be the last time she checked? He barely remembered that song. He was going to say, “No—it’s ‘Fools Rush In.’ ” But she turned the page, and he didn’t say anything.
On Sundays he visited Daisy, sitting on the couch. They spoke frequently of Nina. She was in a program for eating disorders, and having private psychotherapy, and family therapy, too. Daisy was in touch with the girl by phone, and frequently spoke to her mother. Talking all this over, Harmon sometimes felt that Nina was their child, his and Daisy’s—that every aspect of her well-being was their great concern. When she gained weight, they broke a doughnut in half, and touched it together as a toast. “To doughnut breakers,” Harmon said. “To Muffin Luke.”
When he was in town, it seemed he saw couples everywhere; arms tucked against the other in sweet intimacy; he felt he saw light flash from their faces, and it was the light of life, people were living. How much longer would he live? In theory, he could live twenty more years, even thirty, but he doubted that he would. And why would he want to, unless he was altogether healthy? Look at Wayne Roote, only a couple years older than Harmon, and his wife had to tape a note to the television saying what day it was. Cliff Mott, just a ticking bomb waiting to go off, all those arteries plugged. Harry Coombs’d had a stiff neck, and was dead from lymphoma by the end of last year.
“What will you do for Thanksgiving?” Harmon asked Daisy.
“I’ll go to my sister’s. It’ll be fine. And what about you? Will all the boys be home?”
He shook his head. “We have to drive three hours to have it with Kevin’s in-laws.” As it turned out, Derrick didn’t come, choosing to go to his girlfriend’s instead. The other boys were there, but it wasn’t their house, and seeing them was almost like visiting relatives, not sons.
“Christmas will be better,” Daisy promised. She showed him a gift she was sending Nina—a pillow cross-stitched with the words I AM LOVED. “Don’t you think that might help her, to glance at that sometimes?”
“That’s nice,” Harmon said.
“I spoke to Olive, and I’m signing the card from the three of us.”
“That’s very nice, Daisy.”
He asked Bonnie if she wanted to make popcorn balls for Christmas. “God in heaven, no,” Bonnie said. “Whenever your mother made those, I thought my teeth would come out.” For some reason, this made Harmon laugh, the long familiarity of his wife’s voice—and when she laughed with him, he felt a splintering of love and comfort and pain spread through him. Derrick came home for two days; he helped his father chop down a Christmas tree, helped him put it up, and then the day after Christmas, he left to go skiing with some friends. Kevin was not as jovial as Harmon remembered him; he seemed grown-up and serious, and maybe a little bit afraid of Martha, who wouldn’t eat the carrot soup when she found it had been made with a chicken stock base. The other boys watched sports on television, and went off to visit their girlfriends in towns far away. It occurred to Harmon it would be years before they had a house full of grandchildren.
On New Year’s, he and Bonnie were in bed by ten. He said, “I don’t know, Bonnie. The holidays made me kind of blue this year.”
She said, “Well, the boys have grown up, Harmon. They have their own lives.”
One afternoon at work, when the store was especially slow, he called Les Washburn and asked if the place he had rented to the Burnham boy was still empty. Les said it was, he wasn’t renting to kids again. Tim Burnham had left town, which Harmon hadn’t known. “Went off with a different girl, not that pretty hellion who was sick.”
“Before you rent it to anyone,” Harmon said, “just let me know, would you? I might be looking for a work space.”
Then one day in January, when there had been one of those days of midwinter thaw, the snow melting for just a few moments, making the sidewalks