Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [63]
“She got breast cancer, Janie. She called me at the office that spring before I retired, and I hadn’t heard from her in years. Really years, Janie.”
“Okay,” Jane said.
“She was very unhappy. I felt bad.” He still did not look at her; he stared over the steering wheel. “I felt…I don’t know. I can tell you I wish she hadn’t called.” Now he sat back, taking a deep breath. “I had to go to Orlando to close down that account, so I told her I’d come see her, and I did. I went down to Miami and I saw her, and it was awful, it was pathetic, and the next day I flew back from Miami, where I saw the Grangers.”
“You spent the night with her in Miami?” Jane was shivering now, her teeth would chatter if she let them.
Bob was slumped in his seat. He put his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes. “I wanted to drive back to Orlando that night. That’s what I’d planned. But it was too late. I didn’t feel like I could leave, and then, frankly, it was too late for me to feel I could safely drive back. It was awful, Janie. If you could know how stupid and awful and miserable it was.”
“So how much have you spoken with her since then?”
“I called her once, a few days after I got back, and that was it. I’m telling you the truth.”
“Is she dead?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. I probably would have heard from Scott or Mary maybe, if she’d died, so I assume she hasn’t. But I have no idea.”
“Do you think about her?”
He looked at her pleadingly in the semidarkness. “Jane, I think of you. I care about you. Only you. Janie, it was four years ago. That’s a long time.”
“No, it isn’t. At our age, it’s like turning a couple of quick pages. Blip-blip.” She made a hand gesture in the dark, a quick back and forth.
He didn’t answer this but only looked at her with his head still back against the headrest, as though he had fallen out of some tree and lay now, unable to sit up, his eyes rolling sideways to look at her with exhaustion and terrible sadness. “All that matters is you, Janie. She doesn’t matter to me. Seeing her—it didn’t matter to me. I just did it because she wanted me to.”
Jane said, “But I just don’t understand. I mean, at this point in our lives, I just don’t understand. Because she wanted you to?”
“I don’t blame you, Janie. It’s ridiculous. It was so—nothing.” He put a large gloved hand over his face.
“I have to go in. I’m freezing.” She got out of the car and went up the front steps of their home as though she were stumbling, but she didn’t stumble. She waited for him to unlock the door and then moved past him into the kitchen, then through the dining room into the living room, where she sat down on the couch.
He followed her, and turned on the lamp, then sat on the coffee table, facing her. For a long time they just sat. And she felt that her heart was broken again. Only now she was old, so it was different. He slipped off his coat.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “You want some hot chocolate? Tea?”
She shook her head.
“Take your coat off, though, Janie.”
“No,” she said. “I’m cold.”
“Oh, please, Janie.” He went upstairs and came back down with her favorite sweater, a yellow angora cardigan.
She put the sweater on her lap.
He sat down next to her on the couch. “Oh, Janie,” he said. “I’ve made you so sad.”
She let him help her, in a moment, put the sweater on. “We’re getting old,” she said then. “One day we’re going to die.”
“Janie.”
“I’m scared of it, Bobby.”
“Come to bed now,” he said. But she shook her head. She asked, pulling back from his arm, which had gone around her, “Didn’t she ever marry?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, she never married. She’s mental, Janie.”
After a moment, Jane said, “I don’t want to talk about her.”
“I don’t either.”
“Never again.”
“Never again.”
She said, “It’s that we’re running out of time.”
“No, we’re not, Janie. We still have time together. We could still have twenty years together.”
When he said that, she felt a deep and sudden pity for him. “I need to sit here for just a few more minutes,” she said. “You go on up to bed.”
“I’ll stay