Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [47]
He paid the rent to Les Washburn from their savings account. How soon before Bonnie would notice, he couldn’t say. But he thought he had a few months. What was he waiting for? The labor pains to squeeze so hard his new life would shoot forth? By February, as the slow opening of the world began once more—the air having a lightness of smell at times, the extra minutes of daylight as the sun lingered across a snow-covered field and made it violet in color—Harmon was afraid. What had begun—not when they were “fuck buddies,” but as a sweet interest in the other—questions probing the old memories, a shaft of love moving toward his heart, sharing the love and grief of Nina’s brief life, all this was now, undeniably, a ferocious and full-blown love, and his heart itself seemed to know this. He thought it beat irregularly. Sitting in his La-Z-Boy, he could hear it, feel it pulsing right behind his ribs. It seemed to be warning him in its heavy pounding, that it would not be able to continue like this. Only the young, he thought, could withstand the rigors of love. Except for little cinnamon-colored Nina; and it seemed all inside out, backward to forward, that he had been handed the baton by her. Never, never, never give up.
He went to the doctor he’d known for years. The doctor stuck metal disks onto his bare chest, wires attached to each one. Harmon’s heart showed no signs of trouble. As he sat in front of the doctor’s big wooden desk, he told the man he perhaps was going to leave his marriage. The doctor said quietly, “No, no, this is no good,” but it was the doctor’s body, the sudden way he moved the folders on his desk, the way he moved back from Harmon, that Harmon would always remember. As though he had known what Harmon didn’t know, that lives get knit together like bones, and fractures might not heal.
But there was no telling Harmon anything. There is no telling anyone anything when they have been infected this way. He was waiting now—living in the hallucinatory world of Daisy Foster’s generous body—waiting for the day, and he knew it would come, when he left Bonnie or when she kicked him out; he didn’t know which of the two would happen, but it would—waiting like Muffin Luke for open-heart surgery, not knowing if he would die on the table, or live.
A Different Road
An awful thing happened to the Kitteridges on a chilly night in June. At the time, Henry was sixty-eight, Olive sixty-nine, and while they were not an especially youthful couple, there was nothing about them that gave the appearance of being old, or ill. Still, after a year had gone by, people in this small New England coastal town of Crosby agreed: Both Kitteridges were changed by the event. Henry, if you met him at the post office now, only lifted his mail as a hello. When you looked into his eyes, it was like seeing him through a screened-in porch. Sad, because he had always been an open-faced and cheerful man, even when his only son had—out of the blue—moved to California with his new wife, something people in town understood had been a great disappointment for the Kitteridges. And while Olive Kitteridge had never in anyone’s memory felt inclined to be affable, or even polite, she seemed less so now as this particular June rolled around. Not a chilly June this year, but one that showed up with the suddenness of summer, days of dappled sunlight falling through the birch trees, making the people of Crosby uncharacteristically chatty at times.
Why else would Cynthia Bibber have approached Olive in the shopping mall out at Cook’s Corner to explain how Cynthia’s daughter, Andrea, who after years of evening classes had earned a social work degree, thought maybe Henry and Olive hadn’t been able to absorb the experience they’d had last year? Panic, when it wasn’t expressed, became internalized—and that, Cynthia Bibber was saying, in an earnest half whisper, as she stood next to a plastic ficus tree, could lead to a depressive situation.
“I see,” said Olive loudly. “Well, you tell Andrea that’s pretty impressive.” Olive, years ago, had