Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [96]
And to Olive’s horror and amazement, the child looked skyward and yelled, “Shit!”
“Honey,” said Ann, and smoothed his hair.
Praise God, came the response from above.
“That’s a parrot?” asked Olive. “Good Lord, it sounds like my Aunt Ora.”
“Yeah, a parrot,” said Ann. “Weird, huh.”
“You couldn’t have said no pets allowed?”
“Oh, we’d never do that. We love pets. Dog-Face is part of our family.” Ann nodded in the direction of the black dog, who, having returned to his ratty bed, now had his long face resting on his paws, his eyes closed.
Olive could barely eat her dinner. She had thought Christopher was going to grill hamburgers. But he had grilled tofu hot dogs, and for the grown-ups had, of all things, diced up a can of oysters and poked them into these so-called hot dogs.
“Are you okay, Mom?” It was Ann who asked.
“Fine,” said Olive. “When I travel, I sometimes find I’m not hungry. I think I’ll just eat this hot dog roll.”
“Sure. Help yourself. Theodore, isn’t it nice to have Grandma come and stay?”
Olive put the roll back onto her plate. Not once had it occurred to her that she was “Grandma” to Ann’s children, who had been, she only recently discovered as the hot dogs had been set before her, fathered by two different men. Theodore did not respond to his mother’s question but gazed at Olive while he ate with his mouth open, making appalling chewing sounds.
Less than ten minutes, and the meal was over. Olive told Chris that she’d like to help clean up but that she didn’t know where anything went. “Nowhere,” Chris said. “Can’t you tell? In this house nothing goes anywhere.”
“Mom, you go make yourself comfortable,” Ann said.
So Olive went down into the basement, where they had brought her earlier with her little suitcase, and she lay down on the double bed. The fact was, the basement was the nicest place Olive had seen in the house. It was “finished” and painted all white, and even had, next to the washing machine, a white telephone.
She wanted to cry. She wanted to wail like a child. She sat up and dialed the phone.
“Put him on,” she said, and waited until she could hear only silence. “Smack, Henry,” she said, and she waited a while longer until she thought she heard a tiny grunt.
“Well. She’s a big girl,” said Olive. “Your new daughter-in-law. Graceful as a truck driver. A little dumb, I think. Something I can’t put my finger on. But nice. You’d like her. You two would get along fine.”
Olive looked around the basement room she was in, and thought she heard Henry grunt again. “No, she’s not going to hightail it up the coast anytime soon. Got her hands full here. Belly full, too. They’ve got me down in the basement. It’s kind of nice, Henry. Painted white.” She tried to think what else to say, what Henry would want to hear. “Chris seems good,” she said. She paused for a long time after that. “Talkative,” she added. “Okay, Henry,” she finally said, and hung up.
Back upstairs, no one was around. Thinking they must be putting the children to bed, Olive stepped through the kitchen and out onto the concrete yard, where twilight was gathering.
“Caught me,” said Ann, and Olive’s heart banged.
“Godfrey. You caught me. I didn’t see you sitting there.”
Ann was holding a cigarette in one hand, balancing a beer on her high belly with the other, her legs apart as she sat on a stool by the barbecue. “Have a seat,” Ann said, gesturing toward the beach chair Olive had been sitting in earlier. “Unless it makes you crazy to see a pregnant woman drink and smoke. Which I totally understand if it does. But it’s just one cigarette and one beer a day. You know, when the kids finally get put down. I call it my meditation time.”
“I see,” Olive said. “Well, meditate away. I can go back inside.”
“Oh, no. I’d love your company.”
In the dusk she saw the girl smile at her. Say what you might about judging a book by its cover, Olive always found faces revealing. Still—the bovine nature of this girl was baffling. Was Ann a bit stupid?