Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [83]
“Olive, could I ask you to do me a favor?”
“I wish you would.”
“Could you, please—” And here the poor woman looks so bereft, dazed, in her green flowered dress, her brown hair coming loose from its pins. “Before you leave, could you go upstairs in the bedroom? Turn right at the top of the stairs. In the closet you’ll find pamphlets, you know, of different places to go. Could you take them with you? Just take them with you, and throw them all away. The basket they’re in, too.”
“Of course.”
Marlene has tears running down past her nose. She wipes her face with a bare hand. “I don’t want to open that closet door, knowing it’s there.”
“Yes,” says Olive. “I can do that.” She brought Henry’s shoes home from the hospital, put them in a bag in the garage, and they are still there. They were new, bought just a few days before the last time they pulled into the parking lot of Shop ’n Save.
“Any other stuff, if you want, Marlene.”
“No. No, Olive. It’s that we sat there and made believe we’d go places together.” Marlene shakes her head. “Even after Dr. Stanley told us what the situation was, we’d go through these pamphlets, talking about the trips we’d take when he got well.” She rubs her face with both hands. “Gosh, Olive.” Marlene stops and looks at the knife Olive is holding. “Oh, gosh, Olive. I’m so embarrassed.” And it seems she really is; her cheeks are flushing a deep pink, now a deep red.
“No need to be,” Olive tells her. “We all want to kill someone at some point.” Olive’s ready right now to say, if Marlene wants to hear, the different people she might like to kill.
But Marlene says, “No, not that. Not that. That I sat there with him and we planned those trips.” She tears at the Kleenex, which is pretty well shredded. “Gosh, Olive, it was like we believed it. And there he was, losing weight, so weak—‘Marlene, bring over the basket of trips,’ he’d say, and I would. It makes me so embarrassed now, Olive.”
An innocent, Olive thinks, gazing at this woman. A real one. You don’t find them anymore. Boy, you do not.
Olive stands up and walks to the window over the little sink, looking down onto the driveway. People are leaving now, the last of them; Matt Grearson gets into his truck, backs out, drives away. And here comes Molly Collins with her husband, walking over the gravel in her low pumps; she put in a full day’s work, Molly did, just trying to do her best, Olive thinks. Just a woman with false teeth and an old husband—who in two shakes will be dead like the rest of them, or worse, sitting next to Henry in a wheelchair.
She wants to tell Marlene how she and Henry talked about the grandchildren they would have, the happy Christmases with their nice daughter-in-law. How only a little more than a year ago they would go to Christopher’s house for dinner and the tension would be so thick, you could put your hand against it, and they’d still come home and say to each other what a nice girl she was, how glad they were that Christopher had this nice wife.
Who, who, does not have their basket of trips? It isn’t right. Molly Collins said that today, standing out by the church. It isn’t right. Well. It isn’t.
She would like to rest a hand on Marlene’s head, but this is not the kind of thing Olive is especially able to do. So she goes and stands near the chair Marlene sits on, gazing out that side window there, looking down at the shoreline, which is wide now that the tide’s almost gone out. She thinks of Eddie Junior down there skipping stones, and she can only just remember that feeling herself, being young enough to pick up a rock, throw it out to sea with force, still young enough to do that, throw that damn stone.
Ship in a Bottle
“You’ll have to organize your days,” Anita Harwood was saying, wiping at the kitchen counter. “Julie, I mean this. People go crazy in prisons and the army because of this exactly.”
Winnie Harwood, who at eleven years old was younger by ten years than her sister, Julie, watched Julie, who