Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [77]
Inside, standing in the kitchen looking around, Molly muses, “Maybe she ought to sell this place, too.”
Olive, having never been inside before, thinks the place looks tired. It’s not just because some tiles are missing from the floor by the stove, or that part of the counter has bubbled up along the edge. The place simply has an air of exhaustion. Dying. Not dying. Either way, it tires you out. Olive peeks into the living room, where a large window looks over the ocean. It is a lot to take care of. On the other hand, it’s Marlene’s home. Of course, if Marlene sells the place, then Kerry, who lives in the room above the garage, will have to move out as well. Too bad, Olive thinks, closing the closet door with their coats hung up, heading back into the kitchen. Kerry Monroe had her eye on Christopher a few years back, smelled some money in that practice of his. Even Henry felt compelled to tell him to watch out. Don’t worry, Christopher said, she’s not my type. Which is pretty funny to think of now. “You could laugh your head off with that one, ha-ha thud,” says Olive to no one, as she comes into the kitchen, knocks her knuckles a few times on the table. “Put me to work, Molly.”
“See if there’s any milk in the refrigerator, and pour it into these creamers.” Molly is wearing a bib apron that she must have found here in the kitchen somewhere. Or maybe she brought it along. One way or another, she appears to have made herself at home. “Now, Olive, tell me. I’ve been wanting to ask. How is Christopher these days?”
Molly sets out plates on the table as quick as playing cards.
“He’s fine,” says Olive. “Now, what else do you want me to do?”
“Arrange these brownies on this. He likes it out there in California?”
“He’s very happy out there. Got a nice practice going.” Little tiny brownies. What was wrong with making a brownie big enough to sink your teeth into?
“How can people in California have problems with their feet?” asks Molly, moving around Olive with a plate of sandwiches. “Don’t they drive everywhere?”
Olive has to actually look at the wall and roll her eyes because of how stupid this woman can be. “But feet they have. And Chris has a very nice practice.”
“Any grandchildren on the way?” Molly draws the words out with a kind of coyness, while she shakes sugar cubes into a little bowl.
“Haven’t heard,” says Olive. “And I don’t believe in asking.” She takes one of the little brownies and puts it into her mouth, making her eyes big at Molly. Olive and Henry had told no one except their old friends Bill and Bunny Newton, who lived two hours away, that Christopher was now divorced. Why tell anyone that? It was nobody’s business, and Christopher living so far away—who needed to know that his new wife had walked out after moving him across the country? And that he didn’t want to come home? No wonder Henry had a stroke! How unbelievable it was! Never, in a hundred years, would Olive tell Molly Collins, or anyone else, how terrible it was when Christopher came back to visit his father in the nursing home, how terse he was with her, how he went back early—this man who was her dearly loved son. A woman, even Marlene Bonney’s age, could expect one day to outlive her husband. A woman could even expect her husband to get old and have a stroke and stay slumped in a chair at a nursing home. But a woman did not expect to raise a son, help him build a lovely house nearby, get started in a steady podiatry business, then have him marry and move across the country and never move home again, even when he found himself deserted by a beast of a wife. No woman, no mother, expected that. To have a son stolen away.
“Leave enough for others, Olive,” says Molly Collins, and then, “Well, at least Marlene has her kids. Wonderful kids they are, too.”
Olive takes another brownie and puts it into her mouth, but then—here they are, the kids themselves, coming through the back door with Marlene, moving through the kitchen as the sound of cars pulling into the gravel