Read Online Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout - Free Book Online Page A

and then the cold water rose over him. It stunned him, how cold the water was, as though he’d been dropped into a huge test tube containing a pernicious chemical eating at his skin. His foot hit something steady in the massive swooshing of the water; he turned and saw her reaching for him, her eyes open, her skirt swirled around her waist; her fingers reached for him, missed, reached for him again, and he got hold of her. The water receded for a moment, and as a wave came back to cover them, he pulled her hard, and her grip on him was so tight he would not have thought it possible with her thin arms that she could hold anything as tightly as she held him.
    Again the water rose, they both took a breath; again they were submerged and his leg hooked over something, an old pipe, unmoving. The next time, they both reached their heads high as the water rushed back, another breath taken. He heard Mrs. Kitteridge yelling from above. He couldn’t hear the words, but he understood that help was coming. He had only to keep Patty from falling away, and as they went again beneath the swirling, sucking water, he strengthened his grip on her arm to let her know: He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing through each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.

The Piano Player
    F our nights a week Angela O’Meara played the piano in the cocktail lounge at the Warehouse Bar and Grill. The cocktail lounge, commodious and comfortable with its sprawl of couches, plump leather chairs, and low tables, was right there as soon as you walked through the heavy doors of the old establishment; the dining room was farther back, with windows overlooking the water. Early in the week the lounge tended to be rather empty, but by Wednesday night and continuing straight through Saturday, the place was filled with people. When you stepped from the sidewalk through the thick oak doors, there was the sound of piano notes, tinkling and constant; and the talk of the people who were slung back on their couches, or sitting forward in their chairs, or leaning over the bar seemed to accommodate itself to this, so the piano was not so much “background” music as it was a character in the room. In other words, the townspeople of Crosby, Maine, had for many years now taken into their lives the cocktail music and presence of Angie O’Meara.
    Angie, in her youth, had been a lovely woman to look at, with her wavy red hair and perfect skin, and in many ways this was still the case. But now she was into her fifties, and her hair, pinned back loosely with combs, was dyed a color you might consider just a little too red, and her figure, while still graceful, had a thickening of its middle, the more noticeable, perhaps, because she was otherwise quite thin. But she was long-waisted, and when she sat at the piano bench, she did so with the ease of a ballet dancer, albeit past her prime. Her jawline had gone soft and uneven, and the wrinkles near her eyes were quite pronounced. But they were kind wrinkles; nothing harsh—it seemed—had happened to this face. If anything, her face revealed itself too clearly in a kind of simple expectancy no longer appropriate for a woman of her age. There was, in the tilt of her head, the slight messiness of the very bright hair, the open gaze of her blue eyes, a quality that could, in other circumstances, make people uncomfortable. Strangers, for example, who passed her in the Cook’s Corner shopping mall were tempted to sneak an extra peek or two. As it was, Angie was a familiar figure to those who lived in town. She was just Angie