Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [95]
She emerged, blinking, into a small outdoor area—this could not possibly be what he meant as a garden. She stood on a square of concrete. Around her was a chicken wire fence that had been knocked into by something large enough to leave a whole section gaping and broken. A child’s plastic swimming pool was before her. In it, a naked baby sat, staring at her, while a small, dark-haired boy stood nearby, his wet swim trunks sticking to his skinny thighs. He stared at her as well. Behind him, a black dog lay on an old dog bed.
Not far from Olive, a wooden staircase rose, leading to a wooden deck above her head. From the shadow beneath the stairs came the word, “Olive.” A woman appeared, holding a barbecue spatula. “Gosh, there you are. What a sight for sore eyes. I am so glad to meet you, Olive.” Briefly Olive had the image of a huge walking girl-doll; the hair was black and cut straight above the shoulders, the face as open and guileless as a simpleton’s.
“You must be Ann,” said Olive, but the words were lost in a hug the large girl wrapped her in, the spatula falling to the ground, causing the dog to groan and stand up; Olive could see this from just a sliver of vision left to her. Taller than Olive, and with a stomach huge and hard, this Ann held her long arms around her and kissed the side of Olive’s head. Olive did not kiss people. And to be held in the arms of a woman taller than she was—well, Olive was positive this had never happened before.
“Do you mind if I call you Mom?” asked the girl, stepping back but holding Olive by her elbows. “I’m so dying to call you Mom.”
“Call me anything you want,” Olive replied. “I guess I’ll call you Ann.”
The boy moved like a slithery animal to grab hold of his mother’s ample thigh.
“You’re Thaddeus, I suppose,” said Olive.
The boy began to cry.
“Theodore,” said Ann. “Honey, that’s all right. People make mistakes. We’ve talked about that, right?”
A rash stood out high on Ann’s cheek, and ran down the side of her neck, where it disappeared under a huge black T-shirt worn over black leggings. Her feet were bare; bits of a pink polish were on her toenails.
“Perhaps I’d better sit down,” Olive said.
“Oh, absolutely,” Ann said. “Honey, pull that chair over here for your mother.”
In the midst of the aluminum beach chair scraping across the cement and the boy crying and Ann saying, “God, Theodore, what is it?”—in the midst of all this, one shoe off and one shoe on, sinking back into the beach chair, Olive distinctly heard the words Praise Jesus.
“Theodore, honey, please, please, please stop crying.”
In the plastic pool the baby slapped the water and shrieked. “Jesus, Annabelle,” said Christopher. “Keep it down.”
Praise the Lord, came distinctly from somewhere above.
“What in God’s name—” said Olive, putting her head back, squinting upward.
“We rent the top floor to a Christian,” Ann said in a whisper, rolling her eyes. “I mean, who would think here in this neighborhood we’d get stuck with a tenant who’s a Christian?”
“Christian?” said Olive, looking back at her daughter-in-law, thoroughly confused. “Are you a Muslim, Ann? Is there a problem?”
“Muslim?” The girl’s plain, big face looked pleasantly at Olive while she bent to pick up the baby from the pool. “I’m not a Muslim.” Quizzically: “Wait, you’re not a Muslim, are you? Christopher never—”
“Oh, godfrey,” said Olive.
“What she means,” Christopher explained to his mother, fiddling with a large barbecue grill near the staircase, “is that most people in this neighborhood don’t go to church. We live in the cool part of Brooklyn, hippity hop as hell, Mother dear, where people are either too artsyfartsy to believe in God, or too busy making money. So it’s somewhat unusual to have a tenant who’s a real so-called Christian.”
“You mean like a fundamentalist,” said Olive, amazed once again at how talkative her son had become.
“Right,” said Ann. “That’s what he is. You know, fundamentally Christian.”
The boy had stopped his crying and, still holding his mother’s leg, said to Olive