For two years they did this, talked maybe once a week. They talked more often during the basketball season, when Marie was practicing in the gym. Dorie never asked Denny about Marie, though she’d have seen him in the halls with her. He saw Dorie with different guys, always a different fellow seemed to be following Dorie, and she’d laugh with whoever it was, and call out, “Hi, Denny!” He had really loved her. The girl was so beautiful. She was just a thing of beauty.
“I’m going to Vassar,” she said to him the spring of their senior year, and he didn’t know what she meant. After a moment she added, “It’s a college in upstate New York.”
“That’s great,” he said. “I hope it’s a really good college, you’re awfully smart, Dorie.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Yeah, it’s a good college.”
He could never remember the last time they spoke. He did remember that during the graduation ceremony, when her name was called, there had been some catcalls, whistles, things of that sort. He was married within a year, and he never saw Dorie again. But he remembered where he was—right outside the main grocery store here in town—when he found out that she had finished Vassar and then killed herself. It was Trish Bibber who told him, a girl they had been in school with, and when Denny said, “Why?,” Trish had looked at the ground and then she said, “Denny, you guys were friendly, so I don’t know if you knew. But there was sexual abuse in her house.”
“What do you mean?” Denny asked, and he asked because his mind was having trouble understanding this.
“Her father,” said Trish. And she stood with him for a few moments while he took this in. She looked at him kindly and said, “I’m sorry, Denny.” He always remembered that too: Trish’s look of kindness as she told him this.
So that was the story of Dorie Paige.
* * *
—
Denny headed back to his house; he went up Main Street. A sudden sense of uneasiness came over him, as though he was not safe; in fact, the town had changed so much over these last few years that people no longer strolled around at night, as he was doing. But he had not thought of Dorie for quite a while; he used to think of her a great deal. Above him the moon shone down; its brightness continued, as though the memory of Dorie—or Dorie herself—had made it so. “I bet your house isn’t quiet,” she had said.
And suddenly it came to Denny: His house was quiet now. It had been getting quieter for years. After the kids got married and moved away, then, gradually, his house became quiet. Marie, who had worked as an ed tech at the local school, had retired a few years ago, and she no longer had as much to say about her days. And then he had retired from the store, and he didn’t have that much to say either.
Denny walked along, passing the benches near the bandstand. A few leaves scuttled in front of him in the harsh breeze. Where his mind went he could not have said, or how long he had walked. But he suddenly saw ahead of him a heavy man bent over the back of a bench. Almost, Denny turned around. But the large body was just draped over the back of the bench—such an unusual thing—and appeared not to be moving. Slowly Denny approached. He cleared his throat loudly. The fellow did not move. “Hello?” Denny said. The man’s jeans were slightly tugged down because of the way he was hanging over the bench, and in the moonlight Denny could see the beginning of the crack of his ass. The fellow’s hands were in front of him, as though pressed down on the seat of the bench. “Hello?” Denny said this much more loudly, and still there was no response. He could see the fellow’s hair, longish, pale brown, draped across his cheek. Denny reached and touched the man’s arm, and the man moaned.
Stepping back, Denny brought out his phone and called 911. He told the woman who answered where he was and what he was looking at, and the dispatcher said, “We’ll have someone right there, sir. Stay on the line with me.” He could hear her speaking—into another phone?—and he could hear static and clicks and he waited. “Okay, sir. Do you know if the man is alive?”
“He moaned,” Denny said.
“Okay, sir.”
And then very shortly—it seemed to Denny—a police car with its blue lights flashing drove right up, and two cops got out of the car. They were calm, Denny noticed, and they spoke to him briefly, then went to the man who was draped across the back of the bench. “Drugs,” said one of the policemen, and the other said, “Yep.”
One of the policemen reached into his pocket and brought out a syringe, and he steadily, quickly, pulled up the sleeve of the man’s jacket and injected the man, in his arm, in the crook of his elbow, and very soon the man stood up. He looked around.
It was the Woodcock boy.
Denny would not have recognized him, except that his eyes, deep-set on a handsome face, looked at Denny and said, “Hey, hi.” Then his eyes rolled up for a moment, and the policemen had him sit down on the bench. He was not a boy any longer—he was a middle-aged man—yet Denny could think of him only as a kid in his daughter’s class years ago. How had he turned into this person? Large—fat—with his longish hair and all doped up? Denny stayed where he was, looking at the back of the fellow’s head, and then an ambulance drove up, siren screaming and lights flashing, and within moments two EMT men jumped out and spoke to the policemen, one of the policemen saying, Yes, he had injected him with Naloxone right away. The two EMT men took the Woodcock boy’s arms and walked him into the ambulance; the door shut.
As the ambulance drove away, one of the policemen said to Denny, “Well, you saved a life tonight,” and the other policeman said, getting into the car, “For now.”
Denny walked home quickly, and he thought: It was not his children at all. This seemed to come to him clearly. His children had been safe in their childhood home, not like poor Dorie. His children were not on drugs. It was himself about which something was wrong. He had been saddened by the waning of his life, and yet it was not over.
Hurriedly he went up the steps to his house, tossing his coat off, and in the bedroom Marie was awake, reading. Her face brightened when she saw him. She put her book down on the bed and waved her hand at him. “Hi there,” she said.
Pedicure
It was November.
No snow had fallen yet in Crosby, Maine, and because the sun was out on this particular Wednesday there was a kind of horrifying beauty to the world: The oak trees held their leaves, golden and shriveled, and the evergreens stood at attention as though cold, but the other trees were bare and dark-limbed, stretching into the sky with dwindling spikiness, and the roads were bare, and the fields were swept clean-looking, everything sort of ghastly and absolutely gorgeous with the sunlight that fell at an angle, never reaching the top of the sky. The sky was a darkish blue.
Jack Kennison suggested to Olive Kitteridge that they take a ride in the car. “Oh, I love rides,” she said, and he said he knew that, he was suggesting a ride to make her happy. “I’m happy,” she said, and he said he was too. So they got into their new Subaru—Olive didn’t care for his sports car—and off they went; they decided to head for Shirley Falls, an hour away, where Olive had gone to high school, and where her first husband, Henry, had come from.
Jack and Olive had been together now for five years; Jack was seventy-nine and Olive seventy-eight. The first months, they had slept holding each other. Neither one of them had held another person in bed all night for years. When Jack had been able to be away with Elaine, they sort of held each other at night in whatever hotel they were in, but it was not the same as what he and Olive did their first months together. Olive would put her leg over both of his, she would put her head on his chest, and during the night they would shift, but always they were holding each other, and Jack thought of their large old bodies, shipwrecked, thrown up upon the shore—and how they held on for dear life!
He would never have imagined it. The Olive-ness of her, the neediness of himself; never in his life would he have imagined that he would sp
end his final years with such a woman in such a way.
It’s that he could be himself with her. This is what he thought during those first number of months with a sleeping, slightly snoring Olive in his arms; this is what he still thought.
She irritated him.
She would not have breakfast, but would get going right away, as if she had things to do. “Olive, you don’t have anything to do,” he would say. And she thumbed her nose at him. Thumbed her nose. God.
It was not until after they married that he began to understand that her anxiety level was high. She rocked her foot constantly as she sat in her chair, she would suddenly leave the house, saying she had to buy some fabric at the Joann fabric store, and she would be gone within moments. But she still clung to him at night, and he still clung to her. And then after another year they did not cling to each other at night but shared the bed and argued about who had taken the blankets during the night; they were really a married couple. And she had grown increasingly less anxious; quietly, this made Jack feel wonderful.
But a couple of years ago they had gone to Miami and Olive hated it. “What are we supposed to do, just sit in the sun?” she had demanded, and Jack took her point; they came home. Last year they had gone to Norway on a cruise around the fjords and they had liked that a great deal better. These days taking a drive was what they both enjoyed. “Like a couple of old farts,” Jack had said during their last drive, and Olive said, “Jack, you know I hate that word.”
* * *
—
They drove along now, leaving the town of Crosby, Maine, behind; they drove past the little field with the stone wall and the rocks that showed through the pale grass. “Well,” Olive said. “Edith fell off the pot and broke her arm, so they had to take her away.”
“Take her away?” Jack asked; he glanced over at her.
“Oh, you know.” Olive wiggled her hand through the air. “Off to rehab, or wherever.”
“Is she going to be all right?”
“Dunno. Suspect so.” Olive looked out her window; they were entering the town of Bellfield Corners. “God,” she said, “is this town sad.” Jack agreed that the town was sad. Only one diner was open on Main Street, and there was a credit union, and a gas station. Everything else was closed down. Even the mill, which you used to see when you first came into town, had been torn down in the last ten years; Olive told this to Jack.
“I’ve never been to Shirley Falls,” Jack said as they drove out of the town of Bellfield Corners onto the open road once more.
Olive moved so that her back was almost against the car door, and she looked at Jack. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “You have never been to Shirley Falls?”
“Why would I have been to Shirley Falls?” Jack asked. “What’s in Shirley Falls these days? Oh, I know it was important, way back in the day, but what’s there now?”
“Somalis,” said Olive, turning forward once more.
“Oh, right,” Jack said. “I forgot about them.” Then he said, “Okay, I didn’t forget about them, I just haven’t thought about them for a while.”
“Ay-yuh,” Olive said.
“How did Edith fall off the pot?” Jack asked after a few moments.
“How? I suspect she just…fell. How do I know?”
Jack laughed; he loved this woman. “Well, you know she fell. You know lots of things, Olive.”
“Say, do you know what Bunny Newton told me the other day? Apparently her husband used to know this man who lost his wife, and this man liked this other woman for ten years—even while his wife was still alive—and this other woman, on her birthday, went out and sat down in the middle of the turnpike and got hit and killed. Just sat herself down. Did you ever hear of such a thing? Now the man is mourning her far more than he mourned his wife.”
“So she killed herself?”
“Sounds like that to me. Godfrey, what a way to go.”
“And how old was this woman?”
“Sixty-nine. Oh, and she weighed eighty-seven pounds. So Bunny says. I think it sounds a little crazy to me.”
“It sounds like some piece of information is missing,” Jack said.
“I’m just reporting,” Olive answered. “Oh,” she said, “the woman was filing for divorce. Maybe that’s important, who knows. Crazy.”
“It’s not one of your better stories,” Jack conceded.
“No, it’s not.” After a few minutes Olive said, “I really liked my pedicure, Jack.”
“I’m glad, Olive. You can have another one.”
“I plan on it,” she said.
* * *
—
A few days earlier, Jack had come upon Olive in the bedroom, and she had tiny tears coming from her eyes. It was because she couldn’t cut her toenails anymore, not the way she used to be able to, she was too big and too old to get her feet close enough to her, and she hated, she said, she just hated having her toenails so awful-looking. And so Jack had said, “Well, let’s get you a pedicure,” and Olive acted like she barely knew such a thing was possible. “Come on, come on,” Jack said, and he got her in the car and drove her out to Cook’s Corner, where there was a nail salon. “Come on,” he said as she hung back, and so she followed him into the place, and Jack said, “This woman would like a pedicure,” and the small Asian woman said, Yes, yes, okay, this way. Jack said, “I’ll be back,” and waved at Olive, who looked bewildered, but when he went back and picked her up, what a smile she had on her face.
“Jack,” she said, almost breathless, once they were in the car. “Jack, they have one jug of water for one foot, and another jug for the other, well, they’re like little tiny bathtubs, and you just stick your feet in, and the woman, oh, she did a wonderful job—!”
“You’re an easy woman to please,” he had said to her.
And she had said, “You may be the first person to think that.”
Now Olive said, “She rubbed my calves, oh, it felt good. Massaged, that’s the word. She massaged my calves. Lovely.” After another moment she added, “You know that writer who writes all those spooky books—what’s her name—Sharon McDonald—well, she’s just a Bellfield Corners girl, is all she is.”
“What do you mean?” Jack asked.
“I mean, years ago, when she was starting out, she started out her life in Bellfield Corners. That’s all she is, really. Just a Bellfield Corners girl.”
Jack considered this. “Well, maybe that’s why she can write about horror so well.”
“I didn’t know she wrote anything well,” Olive said.
“Boy, are you a snob,” Jack said.
And Olive said, “And you’re a nitwit, if you read her junk.”
“I’ve never read her junk,” Jack said. He did not say that his dead wife, Betsy, used to read everything the woman wrote, there was no point in telling Olive that. They were driving along the river now, and there was a beauty to it, the starkness, the gray ribbon of it right next to the road. “I’m glad we’re taking this drive,” Jack said.
“Oh, me too,” Olive said. Then she said, “Say, I have a story for you. Bunny and her husband were at Applebee’s the other night, and they were sitting toward the back and there was only one other couple, just as fat as can be, and then the man began to cough, and then he began to throw up—”
“God, Olive.”
“No, listen to this. He kept vomiting, and the woman pulled out these plastic bags and kept apologizing to Bunny while she held these plastic bags for the man to keep puking into.”
“They should have called an ambulance,” Jack said, and Olive said, “That’s what Bunny suggested. But it turned out the man had a medical condition called, oh, what was it called, Zanker’s? Zenker’s diverticu—something, according to the wife, so Bunny and Bill paid their bill, and this poor fat couple sat while he finished throwing up.”
“God,” Jack said. “My God, Olive.”
“Just reporting.” She shrugged.
They were only now entering Shirley Falls, through the back way. The buildings became much closer to one another, and the high wooden houses, built years ago for the millworkers, were there as well, almost on top of one another, with their wooden staircases down the backs of them. Jack peered through the car window and saw a few black women wearing hijabs and long robes walking along the sidewalk. “Jesus,” he said, because the sight surprised him.
“My mother, back in the day,” Olive said, “oh, she hated hearing people speaking French on the city buses here. And of course many of them were speaking French, they had come from Quebec to work in the mills, but, oh, how Mother hated that. Well, times change.” Olive said this cheerfully. “Look at these people,” she added.
“It’s kind of weird, Olive.” Jack said this, peering to the right and left. “You have to admit. Jesus. It’s like we drove into a nest of them.”
“Did you just say a nest of them?” Olive asked.
“I did.”
“That’s offensive, Jack.”
“I’m sure it is.” But he felt slightly ashamed, and he said, “Okay, I shouldn’t have put it that way.”
They drove through the town, which seemed to Jack to be very bleak, and then they drove across the river and up a long hill where there were houses in neighborhoods. “Turn, turn, right there,” Olive demanded, so Jack turned right and they drove down the street and she showed him the house that Henry had grown up in.
“Nice,” Jack said. He didn’t really care where Holy Henry had grown up. But he made himself look, and consider, and it seemed the right place for Henry to have been raised. The house was a small two-story, dark-green, with a huge maple tree on its front lawn.
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