Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [48]
“It’s a specialty now,” Cynthia Bibber was saying.
“What is?” asked Olive, considering the possibility of some frozen chocolate yogurt if this woman would move on.
“Crisis counseling,” said Cynthia. “Even before nine-eleven”—she shifted a package under her arm—“but when there’s a crash, or a school shooting, or anything nowadays, they bring in psychologists right off the bat. People can’t process this stuff on their own.”
“Huh.” Olive glanced down at the woman, who was short and small-boned. Olive, big, solidly built, towered over her.
“People have noticed a change in Henry,” Cynthia said. “And you, too. And it’s just a thought that crisis counseling might have helped. Could still help. Andrea has her own practice, you know—gone in with another woman part-time.”
“I see,” said Olive again, quite loudly this time. “Aren’t they ugly words, Cynthia, that those people think up—process, internalize, depressive whatever. It’d make me depressive to go around saying those words all day.” She held up the plastic bag she carried. “D’you see the sale they’re having at So-Fro?”
In the parking lot she couldn’t find her keys and had to dump the contents of her pocketbook out onto the sun-baked hood of the car. At the stop sign she said, “Oh, hells bells to you,” into the rearview mirror when a man in a red truck honked his horn, then she pulled into traffic, and the bag from the fabric store slid onto the floor, a corner of denim material poking out onto the gravelly mat. “Andrea Bibber wants us to make an appointment for crisis counseling,” she’d have said in the old days, and it was easy to picture Henry’s big eyebrows drawing together as he stood up from weeding the peas. “Godfrey, Ollie,” he’d have answered, the bay spread out behind him and seagulls flapping their wings above a lobster boat. “Imagine.” He might even have put his head back to laugh the way he did sometimes, it would have been that funny.
Olive merged onto the highway, which was how she’d gotten home from the mall ever since Christopher had moved to California. She didn’t care to drive by the house with its lovely lines, and the big bowed window where the Boston fern had done so well. Out here by Cook’s Corner the highway went along the river, and today the water was shimmery and the leaves of poplars fluttered, showing the paler green of their undersides. Maybe, even in the old days, Henry wouldn’t have laughed about Andrea Bibber. You could be wrong thinking you knew what people would do. “Bet you anything,” Olive said out loud, as she looked over at the shining river, the sweet ribbon of it there beyond the guardrails. What she meant was: Bet you anything Andrea Bibber has a different idea of crisis than I do. “Yup, yup,” she said. Weeping willows were down there on the bank, their swooping, airy boughs a light, bright green.
She had needed to go to the bathroom. “I need to go to the bathroom,” she had said to Henry that night as they were pulling into the town of Maisy Mills. Henry had told her, pleasantly, she’d have to wait.
“Ay-yuh,” she had said, pronouncing the word with exaggeration in order to make fun of her mother-in-law, Pauline, dead for some years, who used to say that in response to anything she didn’t want to hear. “Ay-yuh,” Olive had repeated. “Tell my insides,” she added, shifting slightly in the darkened car. “Good Lord, Henry. I’m about ready to explode.”
But the truth was, they had had a pleasant evening. Earlier, farther up the river, they had met their friends Bill and Bunny Newton, and had gone to a restaurant recently opened, enjoying themselves a good deal. The mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat were marvelous, and all evening the waiters bowed politely,