Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [57]
“Olive, we were scared that night.” He gave her knee a faint squeeze. “We were both scared. In a situation most people in a whole lifetime are never in. We said things, and we’ll get over them in time.” But he stood up, and turned and looked out over the water, and Olive thought he had to turn away because he knew what he said wasn’t true.
They would never get over that night. And it wasn’t because they’d been held hostage in a bathroom—which Andrea Bibber would think was the crisis. No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other. And because she had, ever since then, been weeping from a private faucet inside her, unable to keep her thoughts from the red-haired boy with his blemished, frightened face, as in love with him as any schoolgirl, picturing him at his sedulous afternoon work in the prison garden; ready to make him a gardening smock as the prison liaison had told her she could do, with the fabric she bought at So-Fro today, unable to help herself, as Karen Newton must have been with her man from Midcoast Power—poor, pining Karen, who had produced a child who’d said, Just because you’re my grandmother doesn’t mean I have to love you, you know.
Winter Concert
In the dark of the car, his wife, Jane, sat with her nice black coat buttoned up all the way—the coat they’d bought together last year, going through all those stores. Hard work; they’d get thirsty and end up having a sundae at the place on Water Street, the sullen young waitress always giving their senior discount even though they never asked; they had joked about that—how the girl had no idea, as she plunked down their mugs of coffee, that her own arm would someday be sprinkled with age spots, or that cups of coffee had to be planned since blood pressure medicine made you widdle so much, that life picked up speed, and then most of it was gone—made you breathless, really.
“Oh, this is fun,” his wife said now, gazing through the night at all the houses they passed, lit up with different Christmas lights, and it made Bob Houlton smile as he drove; his wife contented, her hands folded on her lap. “All these lives,” she said. “All the stories we never know.” And he smiled further, reaching to touch her mittened hand because he had known she might be thinking that.
Her small gold earring caught the light from a streetlamp as she turned her head. “Remember on our honeymoon,” she asked, “when you wanted me to care about those old Mayan ruins the way you did, and all I wanted to know was which people on the bus had pom-poms on their shower curtains back home? And we had that fight, because deep down you were scared you’d married a dull thing? Pleasant, but dull.”
He said no, he didn’t remember that at all, and she sighed deeply to let him know she thought he did, pointing, then, to a house on the corner done all in blue lights, strings of blue lights up and down the whole front of it, turning her head to keep looking as the car moved past.
He said, “I’m mental, Janie.”
“Very mental,” she agreed. “You have the tickets?”
He nodded.
“Funny to have tickets in order to get into a church.”
In fact, it made sense to move the concert into St. Catherine’s after this latest storm had caused the roof of Macklin Music Hall to cave in. No one had been hurt, but it made Bob Houlton shudder; he had an image of sitting in the plush red seats, he and Jane, and the roof falling in, the two of them suffocating, their life together ending in that horrible way. He was prone to that sort of thinking these days. He had even had a sense of foreboding coming out tonight, but it wasn’t something he’d say; and