Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [76]
“Direct cremation,” Olive says, as she waits for Molly to dig out a seat belt from the mess of dog hairs. “No frills. Door to door. They’ll come right down from Belfast and take you away.”
“What are you talking about?” Molly turns her head toward Olive, and Olive can smell the woman’s breath from those false teeth she’s had for years.
“They don’t advertise,” Olive says. “No frills. I told Henry that’s the outfit we’ll be using when the time comes.”
She pulls out of the parking lot and starts down the road toward the Bonneys’ house, which is way down at the end of the point. She has offered to go back with Molly to help lay out the sandwiches, avoiding, that way, the cemetery. The lowering of the casket and all that business—she can do without.
“Well, it’s a nice day, anyway,” says Molly, as they pass the Bullock place on the corner. “Helps a little bit, I think.” And it’s true the sun is strong, the sky very blue behind the Bullocks’ red barn.
“Is Henry able to understand, then?” Molly asks a few minutes later.
For Olive, this is like someone has swung a lobster buoy and slammed her in the breastbone. But she answers simply, “Some days. I think so, yes.” Lying is not what makes her angry. It’s the question that has somehow made her angry. And yet, she also has an urge to tell this woman, sitting stupidly beside her, how she took the dog over last week on that day the weather was so warm; how she brought Henry out to the parking lot and the dog licked his hands.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Molly says quietly. “Going there every day, Olive. You’re a saint.”
“I’m hardly a saint, and you know it,” Olive answers, but she is so angry she could drive right off the road.
“I wonder what Marlene is going to do for money,” says Molly. “Do you mind if I open a window? I think you are a saint, Olive, but no offense, it smells a little doggy in here.”
“Offense is not taken, I assure you,” says Olive. “Open any windows you like.” She has turned onto Eldridge Road, and this is a mistake because now she will have to drive by the house where her son, Christopher, used to live. She almost always makes a point of going the other way, taking the old route down to the bay, but here she is, and now she prepares herself to turn her head away, feigning nonchalance.
“Life insurance,” Molly is saying. “Cousin Kerry—she told someone there was life insurance, and I guess Marlene’s also thinking of selling the store. Apparently Kerry’s the one who’s been running the business this year.”
Olive’s eye has caught the clutter of cars in the front yard, and she turns her head as though to glance through the spruce trees out to the water, but the afterimage of the junky front yard remains in her eye; and oh, it had been a beautiful place! The lilac by the back door would have its tight little buds now, the forsythia at the kitchen window probably ready to burst—if those beastly people haven’t knocked it down, living there like pigs. Why buy a beautiful house and junk it up with broken cars and tricycles and plastic swimming pools and swing sets? Why do a thing like that?
As they come over the crest where only juniper bushes and blueberry bushes grow, the sun is so bright above the water that Olive has to put the sun visor down. They pass by Moody’s Marina, down into the little gully where the Bonney house is. “Hope I haven’t lost the key she gave me,” says Molly Collins, fishing through her handbag. She holds up a key as the car stops. “Pull up a little farther there, Olive. There’ll be a lot of cars here when they get back from the cemetery.” Years ago, Molly Collins taught home ec at the same school where Olive taught math, and even back then she was a bossy thing. But Olive pulls the car up farther.
“She probably ought to sell the store,” says Molly as they walk around to the side door of the Bonneys