Olive Kitteridge Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Grange Hall. Olive and I used to go. It’s a nice group of people.”
    She stepped past him, her face moist, the top of her hair passing by his eyes. “Or maybe you think that’s square,” he said in the parking lot, lamely.
    â€œI am square,” she said, quietly.
    â€œYes,” he said, just as quietly. “I am too.” As he drove home in the dark, he pictured being the one to take Denise to a Grange Hall dance. “Spin your partner, and promenade…,” her face breaking into a smile, her foot tapping, her small hands on her hips. No—it was not bearable, and he was really frightened now by the sudden emergence of anger he had inspired in her. He could do nothing for her. He could not take her in his arms, kiss her damp forehead, sleep beside her while she wore those little-girl flannel pajamas she’d worn the night Slippers died. To leave Olive was as unthinkable as sawing off his leg. In any event, Denise would not want a divorced Protestant; nor would he be able to abide her Catholicism.
    They spoke to each other little as the days went by. He felt coming from her now an unrelenting coldness that was accusatory. What had he led her to expect? And yet when she mentioned a visit from Tony Kuzio, or made an elliptical reference to seeing a movie in Portland, an answering coldness arose in him. He had to grit his teeth not to say, “Too square to go square dancing, then?” How he hated that the words
lovers’ quarrel
went through his head.
    And then just as suddenly she’d say—ostensibly to Jerry McCarthy, who listened those days with a new comportment to his bulky self, but really she was speaking to Henry (he could see this in the way she glanced at him, holding her small hands together nervously)—“My mother, when I was very little, and before she got sick, would make special cookies for Christmas. We’d paint them with frosting and sprinkles. Oh, I think it was the most fun I ever had sometimes”—her voice wavering while her eyes blinked behind her glasses. And he would understand then that the death of her husband had caused her to feel the death of her girlhood as well; she was mourning the loss of the only
herself
she had ever known—gone now, to this new, bewildered young widow. His eyes, catching hers, softened.
    Back and forth this cycle went. For the first time in his life as a pharmacist, he allowed himself a sleeping tablet, slipping one each day into the pocket of his trousers. “All set, Denise?” he’d say when it was time to close. Either she’d silently go get her coat, or she’d say, looking at him with gentleness, “All set, Henry. One more day.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    Daisy Foster, standing now to sing a hymn, turns her head and smiles at him. He nods back and opens the hymnal. “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.” The words, the sound of the few people singing, make him both hopeful and deeply sad. “You can learn to love someone,” he had told Denise, when she’d come to him in the back of the store that spring day. Now, as he places the hymnal back in the holder in front of him, sits once more on the small pew, he thinks of the last time he saw her. They had come north to visit Jerry’s parents, and they stopped by the house with the baby, Paul. What Henry remembers is this: Jerry saying something sarcastic about Denise falling asleep each night on the couch, sometimes staying there the whole night through. Denise turning away, looking out over the bay, her shoulders slumped, her small breasts just slightly pushing out against her thin turtleneck sweater, but she had a belly, as though a basketball had been cut in half and she’d swallowed it. No longer the girl she had been—no girl stayed a girl—but a mother, tired, and her round cheeks had deflated as her belly had expanded, so that already there