Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [98]
“So, you’re a landlord,” she finally said, because the oddity of that struck her now.
“Yup.”
“Are they a nuisance?”
“No. It’s just the guy and his religious parrot.”
“What’s the fellow’s name?”
“Sean O’Casey.”
“Really? How old is he?” she asked, pulling herself up in her chair so her breath could move through.
“Let’s see.” Christopher sighed, shifting his weight. He was familiar to her now, slow moving, slow talking. “ ’Bout my age, I think. Little younger.”
“He’s not related to Jim O’Casey, is he? The fellow that drove us to school? They had a shoe full of children. His wife had to move, once Jim went off the road that night. Remember that? She took the kids and went back to her mother. Is this guy upstairs one of those?”
“Haven’t a clue,” Christopher said. He sounded like Henry, the absentminded way Henry used to respond sometimes: Haven’t a clue.
“It’s a common enough name,” Olive admitted. “Still, you might ask him if he’s any relation to Jim O’Casey.”
Christopher shook his head. “Don’t care to.” He yawned, stretching out farther, his head thrown back.
She had first seen him at a town meeting, held in the high school gym. She and Henry were sitting on folding chairs near the back, and this man stood near the bleachers, close to the door. He was tall, his eyes set back under that brow, his lips thin—a certain kind of Irish face. The eyes not brooding exactly, but very serious, looking at her with seriousness. She had felt a pulse of recognition, although she knew she’d never seen him before. Throughout the evening they had glanced at each other a number of times.
On their way out, someone introduced them, and she found he had come to town from West Annett, where he taught at the academy. He had moved with his family because they needed more room, living out there now by the Robinsons’ farm. Six kids. Catholic. Such a tall man he was, Jim O’Casey, and during the introductions there seemed a whiff of shyness to him, a slight deferential ducking of his head, particularly as he shook Henry’s hand, as though already apologizing for absconding with the affections of this man’s wife. Henry, who didn’t have a clue.
As she stepped out of the school that night, into the wintry air, walking with the talking Henry to their car in the far parking lot, she had the sensation that she had been seen. And she had not even known she’d felt invisible.
The next fall Jim O’Casey gave up his job at the academy and started teaching at the same junior high school Olive taught at, the one Christopher went to, and every morning, because it was on the way, he drove them both there, and then back home again. She was forty-four, he was fifty-three. She had thought of herself as practically old, but of course she hadn’t been. She was tall, and the weight that came with menopause had only begun its foreshadowing, so at forty-four she had been a tall, full-figured woman, and without one sound of warning, like a huge silent truck that suddenly came from behind as she strolled down a country road, Olive Kitteridge had been swept off her feet.
“If I asked you to leave with me, would you do it?” He spoke quietly, as they ate their lunch in his office.
“Yes,” she said.
He watched her as he ate the apple he always had for lunch, nothing else. “You would go home tonight and tell Henry?”
“Yes,” she said. It was like planning a murder.
“Perhaps it’s a good thing I haven’t asked you.”
“Yes.”
They had never kissed, nor even touched, only passed by each other closely as they went into his office, a tiny cubicle off the library—they avoided the teachers’ room. But after he said that that day, she lived with a kind of terror, and a longing that felt at times unendurable. But people endure things.
There were nights she didn’t fall asleep until morning; when the sky lightened and the birds sang, and her body lay on the bed loosened, and she could