Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [62]
“What, Janie?”
She shook her head, and he did not ask again.
A traffic light up ahead turned yellow. He slowed down, drove slowly; he stopped.
Jane blurted out: “I hate her.”
“Who?” His tone was surprised. “Olive Kitteridge?”
“Of course not Olive Kitteridge. Why would I hate her? Donna Granger. I hate her. There’s something creepy about her. Smug. Your bunny rabbits. I hate her.” Jane actually stamped a foot against the floor of the car.
“I can’t think it’s worth all that emotion, Janie. I mean, really, do you?” asked Bob, and from the corner of her eye, she saw that he didn’t turn his head to look at her as he asked this.
In the silence that followed, Jane’s anger grew; it became immense, swelling like water around them, as if they had suddenly driven over a bridge and into a pond below—stagnant, cold stuff filled up around them.
“She was so busy getting her hair done that she didn’t even know her kid was pregnant. Didn’t even know it! Still doesn’t know it, probably. She still doesn’t know that I was the one to comfort the girl years ago, I was the one to worry myself sick!”
“You were nice to those girls.”
“That younger sister, though—Patty. She was a nasty thing. I never trusted her, and Tracy shouldn’t have either.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“Tracy was too innocent, you know. Don’t you remember that night she had a slumber party and ended up so crushed?”
“There must have been a hundred slumber parties over the years, Jane. No, I don’t remember that one.”
“Patty Granger told Tracy how some other girl didn’t like her, some girl. She really doesn’t like you, you know.” Jane was almost ready to cry, recalling this. Her chin tingled.
“What are you talking about? You loved Patty.”
“I fed Patty,” Jane answered fiercely. “I fed the goddamn girl for years. Those parents were never home, going this place and that, some party here, some evening there, leaving other people to take care of their kids.”
“Janie, calm down.”
“Please don’t tell me to calm down,” she said. “Please don’t do that, Bob.”
She heard him sigh quietly, could picture in the dark how he rolled his eyes.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, passing Christmas lights, twinkling reindeer; Jane looked out the window, her hands jammed into the pockets of her coat. It wasn’t until they were through town, out on the final long stretch of Basing Hill Road, that Jane spoke again, quietly, with genuine confusion in her voice. “Bobby, I didn’t know you’d ever run into the Lydias at the Orlando airport. I don’t think you ever told me that.”
“You probably forgot. It was a long time ago.”
Ahead of them through the trees the moon gleamed like a shiny little curved particle in the black sky of the night, and something moved in Jane’s water-filled mind. It was the way the Lydia woman had looked at her, and then looked away, right before going up the balcony stairs. Purposefully now, Jane made her voice calm, almost conversational. “Bobby,” she said, “please tell me the truth. You did see them at the Miami airport, didn’t you?”
And when he didn’t answer, she felt her bowels ache, and an age-old sliver of anguish shuddered deep within her—how tired it made her, that particular, familiar pain; a weight that seemed to her to be like a thick, tarnished silver spreading through her, and then it rolled over everything, extinguishing Christmas lights, streetlamps, fresh snow; the loveliness of all things—all gone.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I can’t believe it.” She added, “I really can’t believe it.”
Bob pulled the car into the driveway and turned off the engine. They sat. “Janie,” he said.
“Tell me.” So calm. She even sighed. “Tell me, please,” she said.
She could hear in the darkness of the car how his breathing was quicker now; and her own was, too. She wanted to say their hearts were too old for this now; you can’t keep doing this to a heart, can’t keep on expecting your heart to pull through.
In the dim light that shone from their front porch, his face looked ghastly and ghostly. He must not die right now. “Just