Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [99]
He died later that afternoon, and she supposed his wife was at his side, maybe some of the kids.
She didn’t believe it. “I don’t believe it,” she kept saying to Henry. “What happened?”
“They say he lost control of the car.” Henry shook his head. “Terrible,” he said.
Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately. Absolutely nuts. She was so mad at Jim O’Casey. She was so mad, she went into the woods and hit a tree hard enough to make her hand bleed. She cried down by the creek until she gagged. And she fixed supper for Henry. Taught school all day, and came home and fixed supper for Henry. Or some nights he fixed it for her because she said she was tired, and he’d open a can of spaghetti, and God, that stuff made her sick. She lost weight, looked better than ever for a while, which lacerated her heart with the irony. Henry reached for her often those nights. She was certain he’d had no idea. He would have said something, because Henry was that way, he did not keep things to himself. But in Jim O’Casey there had been a wariness, a quiet anger, and she had seen herself in him, had said to him once, We’re both cut from the same piece of bad cloth. He had just watched her, eating his apple.
“Oh, wait a minute,” Christopher said, sitting up straight. “Maybe I did ask him. Yeah. He said his father was the one who drove into a tree in Crosby, Maine, one night.”
“What?” Olive looked at her son through the darkness.
“That’s when he got really religious.”
“Are you serious?”
“Thus, the parrot.” Christopher extended an arm upward.
“Oh, my goodness,” said Olive.
Christopher dropped his arm with an exaggerated gesture of defeat, or disgust. “Mom, I’m kidding you, for crying out loud. I have no idea who the guy is.”
Through the kitchen window Ann appeared, wearing a bathrobe and a towel around her head.
“Never liked that guy,” Christopher said, musingly.
“Who, the tenant? Keep your voice down.”
“No, what’s his name. Mr. Jim O’Casey. So stupid to drive into a tree.”
There were fingernail clippings and soggy Cheerios on the table when Olive sat down with her cup of coffee in the morning. Ann was in the next room getting Theodore ready, and called out, “Good morning, Mom. Did you sleep?”
“Fine.” Olive raised a hand in a brief wave. She had slept better than she had in four years—since Henry’s stroke. The same hopefulness she had felt on the plane seemed to return as she fell into sleep, holding her on a pillow of soft joy. Ann had no morning sickness; Christopher missed his mother. She was with her son, he needed her. Whatever rupture had occurred, starting years ago, as innocuously as the rash on Ann’s cheek, spreading downward till it had split her from her son—it could be healed. It would be leaving its scar, but one accumulated these scars, and went on, as she would now go on with her son.
“Help yourself, Mom,” Ann called. “To anything.”
“Right-o,” Olive called back. She got up and wiped the table with a sponge, though touching other people’s nail clippings was hardly her thing. She washed her hands thoroughly.
Other people’s kids weren’t her thing either. Theodore came and stood in the doorway, a knapsack on his back, so big that even while the child faced Olive, you could see the knapsack on both sides of him. She picked a doughnut from a box she had seen high on the counter and sat down again with her coffee. “You shouldn’t have a doughnut before you have your growing food,” the boy told her, in a tone amazingly sanctimonious for a child.
“I’d say I’d grown enough, wouldn’t you?” Olive replied, taking a big bite.
Ann appeared