Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [80]
Above her on the deck she hears footsteps, big men’s boot-shoes clump, clump. Matt Grearson’s voice says in a long drawl, “Be a real high tide later tonight.”
“Yep,” says someone else—Donny Madden.
“Marlene’s going to get lonesome out here this winter,” says Matt Grearson after a while.
Godfrey, thinks Olive from her chair below—run like hell, Marlene. Big flub-dub Matt Grearson.
“I guess she’ll manage,” answers Donny, eventually. “People do.”
In another few minutes their boots clump back inside, Olive hears the door close. People manage, she thinks. It’s true. But she takes a deep breath and has to shift her weight on this wooden chair, because it’s not true, too. She pictures Henry, not even a year ago, measuring what was needed for the mopboards in their new room, down on his hands and knees with the measuring tape, telling her the numbers while she wrote them down. Then Henry standing up, a tall man. “Okay, Ollie. Let’s widdle the dogs and go into town.” The car ride—what did they talk about? Oh, how she wants to remember, but she can’t remember. In town, in the parking lot of Shop ’n Save, because they needed milk and juice after they went to the lumber store, she said she would stay in the car. And that was the end of their life. Henry got out of the car and fell down. Never stood up again, never walked down the pebble path to the house again, never said an intelligible word again; only sometimes, those huge blue-green eyes would look at her from the hospital bed.
Then he went blind; now he will never see her again. “Not much to look at these days,” she’s told him, when she has gone to sit with him. “Lost a little weight now we don’t have our crackers and cheese every night. But I guess I look like hell.” He would say that wasn’t true. He would say, “Oh no, Ollie. You look wonderful to me.” He doesn’t say anything. Some days in his wheelchair he doesn’t even turn his head. She makes the drive every day and sits with him. You’re a saint, says Molly Collins. God, how stupid can you be? A scared old woman is what she is; all she knows these days is that when the sun goes down, it’s time to go to bed. People manage. She is not so sure. The tide is still out on that one, she thinks.
Eddie Junior has stayed down there on the shore, skipping stones. His cousins are gone; just Eddie Junior down there on the rocks alone. Hurling those flat stones. Olive feels pleased by how good he is at this, skip-skip, skip-skip; even though the water is no longer flat. She likes the way he immediately bends down, finding another, hurling that.
But there’s Kerry, and where did she come from? She must have gone down to the shore from around the other side of the house, because there she is in her stockinged feet on the rocks, veering over the barnacled rocks, calling out to Eddie. Whatever she’s saying, he doesn’t like. Olive can tell that from here. He keeps on skipping stones, but finally he turns to her and speaks. Kerry opens her arms in a kind of pleading gesture, and Eddie Junior just shakes his head, and a few minutes later, Kerry comes back up from the shore, crawling up the rocks, clearly drunk. She could break her neck out there, Olive thinks. Not that Eddie Junior seems to care. He throws a stone, real hard this time, too hard—it doesn’t skip, just smashes into the water.
For a long time Olive sits there. She looks out over the water, and on the far edge of her mind she can hear people getting into their cars, driving away, but she is thinking of Marlene Monroe, a young girl, so shy, walking home with her sweetheart Ed Bonney, how happy a girl she must have been, standing at Crossbow Corners while the birds chirped and Ed Bonney perhaps said, “Gee, I hate to say goodbye.” They lived right here in this house with Ed’s mother