Read Online Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout - Free Book Online

sit down on the wood box and say, ‘Where’s Olive? Where can Olive be?’ This would go on, till I’d knock on the side, and he’d act surprised. ‘Olive,’ he’d say, ‘I had no idea where you were!’ And I’d laugh, and he’d laugh.”
    Kevin looked over at her; she put her sunglasses on. She said, “I don’t know how long that continued, probably until I was too big to get into the wood box.”
    He didn’t know what to say to this. He squeezed his hands in as tiny a gesture as possible, looking down at the steering wheel. He felt her big presence, and imagined—fleetingly—that an elephant sat next to him, one that wanted to be a member of the human kingdom, and sweet in an innocent way, as though her stubs of forelegs were folded on her lap, her trunk moving just a little as she finished speaking.
    â€œThat’s a nice story,” he said.
    He thought of the boy cleaning the fish, how his father had held his hand out to him. He thought again of John Berryman.
Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides…Mercy!…do not pull the trigger or all my life I’ll suffer from your anger….
He wondered if Mrs. Kitteridge, being a math teacher, knew much poetry.
    â€œLook how the wind’s picked up,” she said. “Always kind of exciting, long as you don’t have a wharf that floats away, like ours used to do. Henry’d be down on those rocks with the waves—Oh, God what a fracas it was.”
    Again, Kevin found himself liking the sound of her voice. Through the windshield he saw the waves coming in higher now, hitting the ledge in front of the marina hard enough to send a spray far into the air, the spray then falling back languidly, the drops sifting through shards of sunlight that still cracked its way between the dark clouds. The inside of his head began to feel as choppy as the surf before him. Don’t go, his mind said to Mrs. Kitteridge. Don’t go.
    But this turbulence in him was torture. He thought how yesterday morning, in New York, as he’d walked to his car, he had for one moment not seen it. And there was that prick of fear, because he’d had it all planned and wrapped up, and where was the car? But there it was, right there, the old Subaru wagon, and then he knew what he’d felt had been hope. Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn’t want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer. That awful story of the man who jumped—and survived—walking back and forth for an hour on the Golden Gate Bridge, weeping, saying that had anyone stopped to ask why he was weeping, he wouldn’t have jumped.
    â€œMrs. Kitteridge, you have to—”
    But she was leaning forward, squinting through the windshield. “Wait, what in
hell—
” And moving faster than he would have thought possible, she was out of the car, the door left open, and had gone to the front of the marina, her black bag left on the grass. For a moment she disappeared, then reappeared, waving her arms, shouting, though he couldn’t hear what she was saying.
    He stepped from the car, and was surprised by the force of the wind that whipped through his shirt. Mrs. Kitteridge was shouting, “Hurry up! Hurry!” Waving her arms like a huge seagull. He ran to where she was and looked down into the water, the tide higher than he’d have thought. Mrs. Kitteridge pointed with a repeated thrust of her arm, and he saw the head of Patty Howe rise briefly above the choppy water, like a seal’s head, her hair wet and darkened, and then she disappeared again, her skirt swirling with the swirling dark ropes of seaweed.
    Kevin turned, so that as he slid down the high sheet of rock, his arms were spread as though to hug it, but there was nothing to hug, just the flat scraping against his chest, ripping his clothes, his skin, his cheek,