Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [6]
He drives over the dirt road, turning onto the paved road that will take him into town. Only a few leaves of deep red remain on the otherwise bare limbs of the maples; the oak leaves are russet and wrinkled; briefly through the trees is the glimpse of the bay, flat and steel-gray today with the overcast November sky.
He passes by where the pharmacy used to be. In its place now is a large chain drugstore with huge glass sliding doors, covering the ground where both the old pharmacy and grocery store stood, large enough so that the back parking lot where Henry would linger with Denise by the dumpster at day’s end before getting into their separate cars—all this is now taken over by a store that sells not only drugs, but huge rolls of paper towels and boxes of all sizes of garbage bags. Even plates and mugs can be bought there, spatulas, cat food. The trees off to the side have been cut down to make a parking lot. You get used to things, he thinks, without getting used to things.
It seems a very long time ago that Denise stood shivering in the winter cold before finally getting into her car. How young she was! How painful to remember the bewilderment on her young face; and yet he can still remember how he could make her smile. Now, so far away in Texas—so far away it’s a different country—she is the age he was then. She had dropped a red mitten one night; he had bent to get it, held the cuff open and watched while she’d slipped her small hand in.
The white church sits near the bare maple trees. He knows why he is thinking of Denise with this keenness. Her birthday card to him did not arrive last week, as it has, always on time, for the last twenty years. She writes him a note with the card. Sometimes a line or two stands out, as in the one last year when she mentioned that Paul, a freshman in high school, had become obese. Her word. “Paul has developed a full-blown problem now—at three hundred pounds, he is obese.” She does not mention what she or her husband will do about this, if in fact they can “do” anything. The twin girls, younger, are both athletic and starting to get phone calls from boys “which horrifies me,” Denise wrote. She never signs the card “love,” just her name in her small neat hand, “Denise.”
In the gravel lot by the church, Daisy Foster has just stepped from her car, and her mouth opens in a mock look of surprise and pleasure, but the pleasure is real, he knows—Daisy is always glad to see him. Daisy’s husband died two years ago, a retired policeman who smoked himself to death, twenty-five years older than Daisy; she remains ever lovely, ever gracious with her kind blue eyes. What will become of her, Henry doesn’t know. It seems to Henry, as he takes his seat in his usual middle pew, that women are far braver than men. The possibility of Olive’s dying and leaving him alone gives him glimpses of horror he can’t abide.
And then his mind moves back to the pharmacy that is no longer there.
“Henry’s going hunting this weekend,” Denise said one morning in November. “Do you hunt, Henry?” She was getting the cash drawer ready and didn’t look up at him.
“Used to,” Henry answered. “Too old for it now.” The one time in his youth when he had shot a doe, he’d been sickened by the way the sweet,