Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [88]
One thing Anita had found to do the day there wasn’t a wedding was write Bruce a letter. She told him she would shoot him if she ever saw him again, if he ever came close to her daughter. “That’s a federal crime, I think,” Jim had told her quietly. “Putting a threat in the mail.”
“Federal crime be damned,” Anita said. “He’s the one who did a federal crime.”
Winnie remembered Cliff Mott telling her mother in the grocery store to stop her crazy talk. It was a strange feeling—to go from being proud of your pretty mother to wondering what people said about her, if maybe she was nuts; and Winnie suddenly thought how her mother didn’t have close friends the way other mothers did. She didn’t talk on the phone or go shopping with anyone.
Now Winnie sat with Julie at the kitchen table, and saw through the window her mother walking around to the rosebushes, a trowel in her hand. “You know what this is all about, don’t you?” Julie said quietly. “Sex.”
Winnie nodded, but she didn’t know, exactly. The sun, bright in the kitchen, was giving her a headache.
“She can’t stand that I had sex with him.”
Winnie got up and dried a plate and put it away. Julie was staring straight in front of her, blankly, like she wasn’t really looking at anything. Winnie had seen her mother looking that way sometimes. “Winnie,” Julie said, still staring, “always lie to Mom. Remember I said that to you. Just lie. Lie your head off.”
Winnie dried another plate.
The gist of it was that Bruce had gotten scared. He didn’t want to break up with Julie, he just didn’t want to marry her. He wanted to live with her instead. Anita had told Julie that if she wanted to live like a common slut with a man who had left her so publicly at the altar, she could expect to never come home again.
“She doesn’t mean it,” Winnie had said to Julie. “People live with each other all over the place.”
“You want to bet? You want to bet she doesn’t mean it?” Julie had said. And Winnie had felt something almost like car sickness; she guessed she didn’t want to bet on anything where their mother was concerned.
“Paint a picture. Read a book. Hook a rug.” Anita’s hand slapped the table with each suggestion. Julie wasn’t answering. She sat nibbling a cracker while Anita and Winnie had soup; they had made it through another day—it was Saturday lunch. “Clean the windows,” Anita said. “Winnie, don’t drink from the bowl like a pig.” Anita wiped her mouth with a paper towel, which is what they used for napkins. “What you should do is call Beth Marden and see about having your job back at the nursery school this fall.” Anita stood and put her bowl into the sink.
“No,” said Julie.
“Say, I know.” Her mother was pleased about this one, Winnie could tell. When her mother’s eyes got shiny like that, it made Winnie want to hug her, the way you’d want to hug some child who’d gotten confused about something.
“Oatmeal cookie dough,” Anita said. She nodded at Julie, then at Winnie. “We’ll make a batch and we won’t bake any. We’ll just eat it all as dough.”
Julie didn’t say anything. She started picking at her nail.
“So, what do you say?” Anita asked.
“I don’t think so,” Julie said, glancing up at her. “I mean, thank you, though—it was a nice idea.”
Anita’s face got blank, like she couldn’t find the expression to put on it. “Julie,” Winnie said. “Come on, it’ll be fun.” She got up and brought out a bowl and a spoon and the measuring cups.
Anita walked out of the kitchen and they heard the front door open and close. Anita was supposed to be working today at her job as a cashier at the hospital’s coffee shop. She had called in sick. Through the window Winnie saw their mother move past the bayberry bushes and head down the road to where her goldfish pool was. The first year Anita made the goldfish pool, she let the fish freeze in the ice for the winter; she said she’d heard you could do that, that they’d thaw out in the spring. Winnie used to scrape the snow off sometimes to look at the blurry orange spots in the ice.
“I guess I blew