Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [93]
“Three days,” she said. “After that I stink like fish.”
“A week, then,” Chris had countered, adding, “You could walk Theodore to school. It’s around the corner one block.”
Like hell, she thought. Her tulips, seen right there through her dining room window, jubilant cups of yellow and red, would be dead by the time she got back. “Give me a few days to make the arrangements,” she said. The arrangements took twenty minutes. She called Emily Buck at the post office and told her to hold her mail.
“Oh, this’ll be good for you, Olive,” said Emily.
“Ay-yuh,” said Olive. “I’m sure.”
Then she called Daisy up the road and asked her to water the garden. Daisy, who’d had fantasies—Olive was certain of this—of living out her widowhood with Henry Kitteridge if only Olive could have died early on, said she would be glad to water the garden. “Henry was always so good about watering mine when I went to see Mother,” Daisy said. Daisy added, “This will be good for you, Olive. You’ll have a good time.”
A good time was not something Olive expected to have again.
That afternoon she drove to the nursing home and explained to Henry what she was up to, while he sat motionless in his wheelchair, the expression on his face one he frequently wore—that of confused politeness, as though something had been placed on his lap that he could not comprehend, but which he felt required a polite expression of thanks. Whether or not he was deaf, there was still some question. Olive did not believe he was, nor did Cindy, the one nice nurse. Olive gave Cindy the number in New York.
“She a good person, this new one?” Cindy counted pills into Dixie cups.
“Haven’t a clue,” Olive said.
“Fertile, though, I guess,” Cindy said, picking up the tray of meds.
Olive had never been in a plane by herself. Not that she was by herself now, of course; there were four other passengers with her in this plane, which was half the size of a Greyhound bus. All of them had gone through security with the complacency of cows; Olive seeming the only one with trepidation. She’d had to remove her suede sandals and the big Timex watch of Henry’s that she wore on her large wrist. Perhaps it was the queer intimacy of standing there in her panty-hosed feet, worried that the watch might not work after it went through the machine, that made her, for one half a second, fall in love with the big security fellow, who said kindly, “There you go, ma’am,” handing her the plastic bowl that had rolled toward her with the watch in it. The pilots, as well—both looking twelve years old with their unworried brows—had been kind, in the easy way they’d asked Olive if she’d mind sitting toward the back for weight distribution, before they climbed into the cockpit, closing the steel door. A thought unfolded before her—their mothers should be proud.
And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats—then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water—seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son’s life.
But at the airport Christopher seemed furious. She had forgotten that, because of security, he would not be able to meet her at the gate, and apparently it hadn’t occurred to him to remind her. Why this should make him so angry, Olive couldn’t figure out. She was the one who had wandered around the luggage area with panic bubbling through her, her face hot as fire by the time Christopher found her lumbering back up the stairs. “Godfrey,