Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [97]
Cigarette smoke wafted in front of her. It amazed her that anyone would smoke these days, and she couldn’t help but feel it as a kind of assault. “Say,” Olive said, “that doesn’t make you feel sick?”
“What, smoking this?”
“Yes. I shouldn’t think that would help the nausea.”
“What nausea?”
“I thought you had the pukes.”
“The pukes?” Ann dropped the cigarette into the bottle of beer. She looked over at Olive, her dark eyebrows raised.
“You haven’t been sick with the pregnancy?”
“Oh, no. I’m a horse.” Ann patted her belly. “I just keep spittin’ these things out with no problem.”
“Apparently.” Olive wondered if the girl was tipsy from the beer. “Where’s your newest husband?”
“He’s reading Theodore a story. It’s nice to have them bonding.”
Olive opened her mouth to ask what kind of bond Theodore had with his real father, but she stopped. Maybe you weren’t supposed to say “real father” these days.
“How old are you, Mom?” Ann was scratching at her cheek.
“I’m seventy-two,” Olive said, “and I wear a size ten shoe.”
“Hey, cool. I wear a size ten. I’ve always had big feet. You look good for seventy-two,” Ann added. “My mother’s sixty-three and she—”
“She what?”
“Oh.” Ann shrugged. “You know, she just doesn’t look so good.” Ann hoisted herself up, leaned toward the grill, where she picked up a box of kitchen matches. “If you don’t mind, Mom, I’m just going to have one more cigarette.”
Olive did mind. This was Christopher’s baby in there, trying to develop its own respiratory system right about now, and what kind of woman would jeopardize such a thing? But she said loudly, “Do whatever you want. I don’t give a damn.”
Praise God, came from above them.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Olive. “How can you stand that?”
“Sometimes I can’t,” Ann said, sitting down again, hugely.
“Well,” Olive said, looking at her lap, smoothing her skirt. “It’s temporary, I guess.” She felt a need to look away as the girl lit a fresh cigarette.
Ann didn’t respond. Olive heard her inhale, then exhale, as the smoke drifted back toward Olive. A realization flowered within her. The girl was panicking. How did Olive know this, never in seventy-two years having put a cigarette to her own lips? But the truth of it filled her. A light went on in the kitchen, and Olive watched through the grated windows as Christopher walked to the kitchen sink.
Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. People thought love would do it, and maybe it did. But even if, thinking of the smoking Ann, it took three different kids with three different fathers, it was never enough, was it? And Christopher—why had he been so foolhardy as to take all this on and not even, until after the fact, bother to tell his mother? In the near darkness, she saw Ann lean forward and put out her cigarette by sticking the tip into the baby pool. A tiny phisst of a sound, then the girl tossed the rest over toward the chicken wire fence.
A horse.
Christopher had not been truthful when he’d e-mailed that Ann had the pukes. Olive put her hand to her cheek, which had grown warm: Her son, being Christopher, would never be able to say, “Mom, I miss you.” He had said his wife had the pukes.
Christopher stepped through the door, and her heart rose toward him. “Come join us,” she said. “Come. Sit down.”
He stood, his hands loosely on his hips, and then he took one hand and rubbed the back of his head slowly. Ann stood. “Sit here, Chris. If they’re asleep I’m going to take a bath.”
He didn’t sit on the stool, but pulled up a chair next to Olive, and sat in the same sprawled-out way that he used to sit on the couch at home. She wanted to say, “It’s awful good to see you, kid.” But she didn’t say anything,