Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [68]
“All right, then.” She drove him to the airport with the dog in the backseat. The house was emptier than ever; even the nursing home seemed changed with Christopher not being there.
The next morning she wheeled Henry over by the piano. “Christopher will be back soon,” she said. “He had some work to finish up, but he’s coming back soon. He’s crazy about you, Henry. Kept saying what a wonderful father you were.” But her voice started to wobble, and she had to move away, looking out the window at the parking lot. She didn’t have a Kleenex, and turned to find one. Mary Blackwell stood there. “What’s the matter?” Olive said to her. “Haven’t you ever seen an old lady cry before?”
She didn’t like to be alone. Even more, she didn’t like being with people.
It made her skin crawl to sit in Daisy Foster’s tiny dining room, sipping tea. “I went to that damn dopey grief group,” she told Daisy. “And they said it was normal to feel angry. God, people are stupid. Why in hell should I feel angry? We all know this stuff is coming. Not many are lucky enough to just drop dead in their sleep.”
“People react in their own way, I guess,” Daisy said, in her nice voice. She didn’t have anything except a nice voice, Olive thought, because that’s what Daisy was—nice. To hell with all of it. She said the dog was waiting, and left her teacup still full.
It was like that—she couldn’t stand anyone. She went to the post office every few days, and she couldn’t stand that either. “How are you doing?” Emily Buck asked her every time, and it annoyed Olive. “I’m managing,” Olive said, but she hated getting the envelopes, almost all with Henry’s name. And the bills! She didn’t know what to do with them, didn’t even understand some of them—and so much junk mail! She’d stand by the big gray waste bin, throwing it all away, and sometimes a bill would get tossed in and she’d have to lean in and fiddle around to find it, all the while aware of Emily watching her from behind the counter.
A few cards dribbled in. “I’m sorry…so sad.” “I’m sorry to hear…” She answered each one. “Don’t be sorry,” she wrote. “We all know this stuff is bound to happen. There’s not a damn thing to be sorry about.” Only once or twice, fleetingly, did it occur to Olive that she might be out of her head.
Christopher called once a week. “What can I do for you, Christopher?” she’d ask, meaning Do something for me! “Shall I fly out and visit you?”
“No,” he always said. “I’m doing all right.”
The tulips died, the trees turned red, the leaves fell off, the trees were bare, snow came. All these changes she watched from the bum-pout room, where she lay on her side, clutching her transistor radio, her knees tucked to her chest. The sky was black against the long panes. She could see three tiny stars. On the radio a man’s calm voice interviewed people or reported news. When the words seemed to shift in meaning, she knew she had slept for a bit. “Yikes,” she said softly, at times. She thought about Christopher, why he would not let her come visit, why he did not come back east. Her mind briefly passed over the Larkins, wondering if they still visited their son. Perhaps Christopher stayed in California hoping to reconcile with his wife—what a fierce know-it-all Suzanne had been. And yet she hadn’t known a damn thing about any flower that grew up out of the earth.
One freezing cold morning, Olive took her walk, went to Dunkin’ Donuts, read the paper in the car while the dog, in the backseat, kept whining. “Hush,” she said. “Stop it.” The dog’s whimpering became louder. “Stop it!” she shouted. She drove. She drove to the library, and didn’t go in. Then she drove to the post office, tossed some junk mail into the waste bin, and then had to bend over and fish out a pale yellow envelope with no return address, the handwriting not one she recognized. In the car she ripped it open, just a plain yellow square. “He was always a nice man, and I’m sure he still is.” Signed, Louise Larkin.
The next