She brushed her teeth, left the dog in his pen.
His shiny red car was in his small driveway. When she knocked on the door, there was no answer. She pushed the door open. “Hello?”
“Hello, Olive. I’m back here. I’m lying down, I’ll be right there.”
“No,” she sang out, “stay put. I’ll come find you.” She found him on the bed in the downstairs guest room. He was lying on his back, one hand beneath his head.
“I’m glad you came over,” he said.
“Are you feeling poorly again?”
He smiled that tiny smile. “Only soul poor. The body bangs on.”
She nodded.
He moved his legs aside. “Come,” he said, patting the bed. “Sit down. I may be a rich Republican, though I’m not that rich, in case you were secretly hoping. Anyway—” He sighed and shook his head, the sunlight from the windows catching his eyes, making them very blue. “Anyway, Olive, you can tell me anything, that you beat your son black and blue, and I won’t hold it against you. I don’t think I will. I’ve beaten my daughter emotionally. I didn’t speak to her for two years, can you imagine such a thing?”
“I did hit my son,” Olive said. “Sometimes when he was little. Not just spanked. Hit.”
Jack Kennison nodded one nod.
She stepped into the room, put her handbag on the floor. He didn’t sit up, just stayed there, lying on the bed, an old man, his stomach bulging like a sack of sunflower seeds. His blue eyes watched her as she walked to him, and the room was filled with the quietness of afternoon sunlight. It fell through the window, across the rocking chair, hit broadside the wallpaper with its brightness. The mahogany bed knobs shone. Through the curved-out window was the blue of the sky, the bayberry bush, the stone wall. The silence of this sunshine, of the world, seemed to fold over Olive with a shiver of ghastliness, as she stood feeling the sun on her bare wrist. She watched him, looked away, looked at him again. To sit down beside him would be to close her eyes to the gaping loneliness of this sunlit world.
“God, I’m scared,” he said, quietly.
She almost said, “Oh, stop. I hate scared people.” She would have said that to Henry, to just about anyone. Maybe because she hated the scared part of herself—this was just a fleeting thought; there was a contest within her, revulsion and tentative desire. It was the sudden memory of Jane Houlton in the waiting room that caused Olive to walk to the bed—the freedom of that ordinary banter, because Jack, in the doctor’s office, had needed her, had given her a place in the world.
His blue eyes were watching her now; she saw in them the vulnerability, the invitation, the fear, as she sat down quietly, placed her open hand on his chest, felt the thump, thump of his heart, which would someday stop, as all hearts do. But there was no someday now, there was only the silence of this sunny room. They were here, and her body—old, big, sagging—felt straight-out desire for his. That she had not loved Henry this way for many years before he died saddened her enough to make her close her eyes.
What young people didn’t know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.
And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter? He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you.
Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude—and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIZABETH STROUT is the author of Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and lives in New York City.
Also by Elizabeth Strout
Abide with Me
Amy and Isabelle
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Elizabeth Strout
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Excerpts from Dream Songs #235 and #384 from The Dream Songs by John Berryman. Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman. Copyright renewed 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
“A Different Road” was published in Tin House in 2007. “A Little Burst” was published in The New Yorker in 1998. “Winter Concert” was published in Ms. in 1999. “Basket of Trips” was published in O: The Oprah Magazine in 2000. “Ship in a Bottle” was published as “Running Away” in Seventeen in 1992. “Criminal” was published in South Carolina Review in 1994.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-688-7
www.atrandom.com
Title page photograph by Pierre deJordy Blanchette
v1.0
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Pharmacy
Incoming Tide
The Piano Player
A Little Burst
Starving
A Different Road
Winter Concert
Tulips
Basket of Trips
Ship in a Bottle
Security
Criminal
River
About the Author
Also by Elizabeth Strout
Copyright
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Pharmacy
Incoming Tide
The Piano Player
A Little Burst
Starving
A Different Road
Winter Concert
Tulips
Basket of Trips
Ship in a Bottle
Security
Criminal
River
About the Author
Also by Elizabeth Strout
Copyright
Olive Kitteridge Page 29