Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [72]
“Who?”
Louise just stared at her with stony beauty. A shiver ran right through Olive.
Louise said, “She was—Oh, she was something, let me tell you, Olive Kitteridge. A cock tease! I don’t care what the papers said about how she loved animals and small children. She was evil, a living monster brought into this world to make a sweet boy crazy.”
“Okay, okay.” Olive was putting her coat on hurriedly.
“She deserved it, you know. She did.”
Olive turned and saw Roger Larkin on the stairs behind her. He looked old, and wore a loose sweater; he had slippers on. Olive said, “I’m sorry. I’ve disturbed her.”
He only raised a hand tiredly, the gesture indicating that she was not to worry, life had brought them to this point and he was resigned to living in hell. This is what Olive thought she saw, as she hurried to get her coat on. Roger Larkin opened the door, nodding slightly, and as the door was closing behind her, Olive was certain she heard the tiny, quick smashing sound of glass, and the spat-out word, “Cunt.”
A bright haze hung over the river, so you could barely make out the water. You couldn’t even see too far ahead on the path, and Olive was consistently startled by the people who passed by her. She was here later than usual, and more people were out and about. Next to the asphalt pathway, the patches of pine needles were visible, and the fringe of tall grasses, and the bark of the shrub oaks, the granite bench to sit on. A young man ran toward her, emerging through the light fog. He was pushing before him a triangular-shaped stroller on wheels, the handles like those of a bicycle. Olive caught sight of a sleeping baby tucked inside. What contraptions they had these days, these self-important baby boomer parents. When Christopher was the age of that baby, she’d leave him napping in his crib, and go down the road to visit Betty Simms, who had five kids of her own—they’d be crawling all over the house and all over Betty, like slugs stuck to her. Sometimes when Olive got back, Chris would be awake and whimpering, but the dog, Sparky, knew to watch over him.
Olive walked quickly. It was unseasonably hot, and the haze was warm and sticky. She felt the sweat run from below her eyes, like tears. The visit to the Larkin home sat inside her like a dark, messy injection of sludge spreading throughout her body. Only telling someone about it would get it hosed out. But it was too early to call Bunny, and not having Henry—the walking, talking Henry—to tell this to grieved her so much that it was as though she had just that morning lost him to his stroke again. She could picture clearly what Henry would say. Always that gentle amazement. “My word,” he’d say, softly. “My word.”
“On your left!” yelled someone, and a bicycle whizzed past her, coming so close she felt the whir of air on her hand. “Jesus, lady,” said the helmeted alien, as he sped by, and confusion rolled through Olive.
“You’re supposed to stay on the right side of the line,” came a voice from behind her, a young woman on Rollerblades. Her voice was not angry, but it was not kind.
Olive turned and walked back to her car.
At the nursing home, Henry was asleep. With one cheek against the pillow, he looked almost the way he used to look, because his eyes were closed, and the blindness was taken away, so the blank, smiling face was gone. Asleep, with the faintest furrowing of his brows, a hint of anxiety seemed caught within him, making him familiar.
Mary Blackwell was nowhere in sight, but an aide told Olive that Henry had had a “bad night.”
“What do you mean?” Olive demanded.
“Agitated. We gave him a pill around four this morning. He’ll probably sleep awhile longer.”
Olive pulled the chair next to the bed, and sat holding his hand beneath the guardrail. It was still a beautiful hand—large, perfectly proportioned. Surely as a pharmacist all those years, while he counted out pills, people watching had trusted