Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [5]
Evenings, adrenaline poured through him. “All I do is cook and clean and pick up after people,” Olive might shout, slamming a bowl of beef stew before him. “People just waiting for me to serve them, with their faces hanging out.” Alarm made his arms tingle.
“Perhaps you need to help out more around the house,” he told Christopher.
“How dare you tell him what to do? You don’t even pay enough attention to know what he’s going through in social studies class!” Olive shouted this at him while Christopher remained silent, a smirk on his face. “Why, Jim O’Casey is more sympathetic to the kid than you are,” Olive said. She slapped a napkin down hard against the table.
“Jim teaches at the school, for crying out loud, and sees you and Chris every day. What is the matter with social studies class?”
“Only that the goddamn teacher is a moron, which Jim understands instinctively,” Olive said. “You see Christopher every day, too. But you don’t know anything because you’re safe in your little world with Plain Jane.”
“She’s a good worker,” Henry answered. But in the morning the blackness of Olive’s mood was often gone, and Henry would be able to drive to work with a renewal of the hope that had seemed evanescent the night before. In the pharmacy there was goodwill toward men.
Denise asked Jerry McCarthy if he planned on going to college. “I dunno. Don’t think so.” The boy’s face colored—perhaps he had a little crush on Denise, or perhaps he felt like a child in her presence, a boy still living at home, with his chubby wrists and belly.
“Take a night course,” Denise said, brightly. “You can sign up right after Christmas. Just one course. You should do that.” Denise nodded, and looked at Henry, who nodded back.
“It’s true, Jerry,” Henry said, who had never given a great deal of thought to the boy. “What is it that interests you?”
The boy shrugged his big shoulders.
“Something must interest you.”
“This stuff.” The boy gestured toward the boxes of packed pills he had recently brought through the back door.
And so, amazingly, he had signed up for a science course, and when he received an A that spring, Denise said, “Stay right there.” She returned from the grocery store with a little boxed cake, and said, “Henry, if the phone doesn’t ring, we’re going to celebrate.”
Pushing cake into his mouth, Jerry told Denise he had gone to mass the Sunday before to pray he did well on the exam.
This was the kind of thing that surprised Henry about Catholics. He almost said, God didn’t get an A for you, Jerry; you got it for yourself, but Denise was saying, “Do you go every Sunday?”
The boy looked embarrassed, sucked frosting from his finger. “I will now,” he said, and Denise laughed, and Jerry did, too, his face pink and glowing.
Autumn now, November, and so many years later that when Henry runs a comb through his hair on this Sunday morning, he has to pluck some strands of gray from the black plastic teeth before slipping the comb back into his pocket. He gets a fire going in the stove for Olive before he goes off to church. “Bring home the gossip,” Olive says to him, tugging at her sweater while she peers into a large pot where apples are burbling in a stew. She is making applesauce from the season’s last apples, and the smell reaches him briefly—sweet, familiar, it tugs at some ancient longing—before he goes out the door in his tweed jacket and tie.
“Do my best,” he says. No one seems to wear a suit to church anymore.
In fact, only a handful of the congregation goes to church regularly anymore. This saddens Henry, and worries him. They have been through two ministers