Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [87]
But he didn’t answer. The three of them kept standing there watching through the window. Julie and Bruce hardly moved. They didn’t touch each other, or even move their arms, and then Bruce stepped through the bayberry bushes and headed to the road.
Julie came back to the house like a walking Barbie doll, and the three of them were at the screen door when she came in. “Mommy,” said Julie, quietly. Her eyes weren’t quite right. “This isn’t happening, is it?”
Uncle Kyle showed up with pills. Jim spoke to the limousine driver and then went off to the church. The limousine drove away, catching the leaves of a poplar tree in its back fender above the tire, and Winnie sat on the steps in her bridesmaid dress. After a while her father came back. “Guess you can take that off, Winnie-doodle,” he said, but Winnie just kept sitting there. Her father went inside, and when he came back out, he said, “Julie’s resting on our bed along with your mother.” Winnie figured that meant Uncle Kyle had drugged them both.
She sat on the steps until she had to go to the bathroom. She didn’t like going to the bathroom in the house anymore, behind the curtain like that, when everyone was home. But no one was around when she went inside. She could hear her father downstairs in the cellar, and her parents’ bedroom door was closed. In a few minutes, though, the door opened and her mother walked out. She had on her old blue skirt, with a pink sweater, and she didn’t look the least bit drugged.
Jim Harwood had been building a boat for years. It was going to be a big boat—the frame took up a lot of the cellar. For almost a year he hadn’t done anything more than spread the blueprints out onto the living room floor and look at them each night. But finally he went into the cellar and set up two sawhorses. Every night the family could hear the electric saw buzzing, and sometimes the sound of hammering, and very slowly the curved-out skeleton of a boat began to appear. The boat stayed in its skeleton shape for a long time. Jim kept going down there night after night to work on it. “It’s at the slow point now, Winnie-doodle,” he said. He had to press pieces of wood in clamps to get them to arch the right way, and then he’d varnish the wood carefully and put over each nail gummy cement that took four days to dry.
“How’re you going to get it out of here when it’s done?” Winnie asked him one night, as she sat watching on the cellar stairs.
“Good question, isn’t it?” he said. He explained how he’d figured it out beforehand, mathematically, measuring the cellar door, and the circumference of the hull, and that theoretically if he turned it at a certain angle, it should be able to get through the door when the time came. “But I’m beginning to wonder,” he said.
Winnie wondered, too. The boat was looking awfully big. “Well, then it will be like a ship in a bottle,” she said, “like the ones at Moody’s store.”
“That’s right,” said her father. “It’ll be kind of like that, I guess.”
When Winnie was smaller, she used to play in the cellar with Julie. Sometimes Julie would play store with her, with the canned food their mother bought, pushing it across a table pretending to ring it up. Now the cellar was pretty much taken over by the boat and her father’s tools. He had built shelves along the wall; up on top was an old rifle that had been around for years, and on the shelves below were wooden boxes filled with cords and nails and bolts, separated according to size.
Sun streamed through the window over the kitchen sink. Winnie could see dust particles floating through the air. “Now,” said her mother, putting down her coffee cup, “let’s get the day figured out. Daddy’s going back to the school for a bit, I’m going to feed my roses, and what are you girls up to?” She raised her eyebrows and tapped her painted fingernails on the table.
Julie and Winnie didn’t say anything. Winnie put her finger on the top of the syrup and then into her mouth.
“Winnie, please, don’t be a pig,” her mother said, standing up, putting her coffee cup into the sink. “Julie,