Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [92]
Winnie sat in the living room with her father. She kept thinking of Julie on the bus riding through the rain, staring out the window at the turnpike going by. She thought her father was probably picturing this too, maybe imagining the sound of the bus’s windshield wipers going back and forth.
“What’re you going to do when you finish the boat?” Winnie asked.
Her father looked surprised. “Well,” he said. “Dunno. Go for a ride, I guess.”
Winnie smiled to be nice, because she didn’t think he’d be going anywhere. “That’ll be fun,” she said.
Toward evening the rain stopped. Anita hadn’t come out of her room. Winnie tried to figure out if Julie was there yet; she didn’t know how long it took to get to Boston, but it took a long time.
“I wonder if she’s got some money with her,” her father said, but Winnie didn’t answer—she didn’t know.
Rain dripped from the side of the roof and off the trees. She thought of all the starfish she had laid out on the rock, all of them drenched from the rain. After a while her father stood up and went to the window. “Didn’t plan on things working out like this,” he said, and Winnie had a sudden thought of him on his own wedding day. Unlike Anita, he had not been married before. Anita had not worn a white dress, because of Julie. “You only wear white once,” Anita had said. There were no wedding pictures—that Winnie knew of, anyway—of her parents’ wedding day.
Her father turned around. “Pancakes?” he asked her.
Winnie didn’t want pancakes. “Sure,” she said.
Security
It was May, and Olive Kitteridge was going to New York. She had never, in her seventy-two years, set foot in the city, although she had on two occasions many years ago sat in a car and ridden past it—Henry at the wheel, worried about this exit and that—and seen from a distance the skyline, buildings against buildings, gray against a gray sky. Like a science-fiction city, it had seemed, built on a moon. It held no appeal, not then, not now—although back when those planes ripped through the towers, Olive had sat in her bedroom and wept like a baby, not so much for this country but for the city itself, which had seemed to her to become suddenly no longer a foreign, hardened place, but as fragile as a class of kindergarten children, brave in their terror. Jumping from the windows—it clutched her heart, and she had felt a private, sickening shame to know that two of the dark-haired hijackers, silently thrilled with their self-righteousness, had come down through Canada and walked through the airport in Portland on their way to such hellacious destruction. (She might have driven right by them that morning, who knows?)
Time passed, though, as it does, and the city—at least from Olive’s faraway vantage—seemed eventually itself again, no place she cared to go, in spite of the fact that her only son had moved there recently, acquired a second wife and two children not his. The new wife, Ann—if you were to believe the one photograph that took ages to download—was as tall and big as a man; pregnant now with Christopher’s child, and according to a characteristically cryptic e-mail from Chris, with no attention paid to punctuation or any use of capital letters, Ann was tired and “had pukes.” In addition, it seemed Theodore turned into a hellion each morning before going off to preschool. Olive had been summoned to help.
The request had not been put this way. After sending the note, Christopher had called from his office and said, “Ann and I’ve been hoping you’ll come visit for a couple of weeks.” To Olive, this meant they needed help. It had been years since she’d been in the company of her son for a couple of weeks.