Элизабет Страут - Olive, Again

When Brenda came over she said, “Just leave us for a bit, Mom.” Sitting beside Kayley on her bed, Brenda said, “Oh, honey, what has happened?” Kayley looked at her; she wanted to cry now, yet she did not let herself. “Honey,” said Brenda, taking Kayley’s hand and stroking it, “honey, just tell me where you got the money, that’s all, honey. Just tell me.”

“If you added it up, you’d see it was my house cleaning money. And also from the doughnut shop.”

Brenda nodded. “Okay, I thought so. Mom just got really, really furious because you’d quit Bertha Babcock and not told her. Mom’s having a hard time, and she saw all this cash and thought maybe there were drugs involved or something.”

“Oh, please, ” said Kayley, and Brenda nodded understandingly, stroking Kayley’s arm now, and said, “Oh, honey, I knew it wasn’t drugs.”

After a few moments Kayley said, “I kind of hate living here with her. She hardly talks to me. And—and it hurts my feelings.”

“Oh, honey,” said Brenda. “Now listen, honey. Mom’s gotten super depressed since Dad died. And she was really too old to have had you—” Brenda leaned in and said, “But thank God she did!” Kayley looked at her sister, the dark patches beneath her eyes; she suddenly remembered how Brenda had said, “He wants it all the time, and it’s kind of making me sick.”

“Brenda, I love you,” Kayley said quietly.

“And we all love you. Now listen to me, honey.” Brenda waited and said, as though it were a secret, “Honey, you’re smart. You know that, right? The rest of us are more like Mom,” and she put her finger to her lips as though to indicate this should be kept secret. “But you’re like Dad. You’re smart. So, Kayley, honey, just keep on doing well in school and you will have a future. A real future.”

“What do you mean, a real future?”

“I mean, you could be a doctor or nurse, or someone important, Kayley.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Brenda said.

The next day, after her mother left for work, Kayley took the many envelopes of cash from her closet, and as she walked around looking for a place to hide them, she suddenly thought of the piano. She opened the top of it, and slipped them in, and watched them fall down to the bottom behind the wires. She had no idea how she would ever get them out, but they were safe there; she had stopped playing the piano.

She now expected nothing from her mother. And so when her mother was suddenly pleasant to her on certain evenings, Kayley was surprised and she was pleasant in return. She talked to her mother about Miss Minnie one night, and her mother listened. Her mother spoke of the different patients that came into the dental office where she worked, and Kayley listened. It was a doable existence.

And this is why one Saturday when Kayley came back from the doughnut shop and stepped into the living room and saw—like a person’s front tooth missing—the absence where the piano had been, she felt gutted, almost as though it was not real.

“I sold it,” her mother said. “You never play it anymore, so I sold it to a Grange Hall near Portland.”

Kayley waited, but no phone call ever came about the money.

On one of the last days of summer, Mrs. Kitteridge came back into the doughnut shop. She was alone this time, and no one else was there at the moment. “Hello, child,” she said, and Kayley said, “Hello, Mrs. Kitteridge.”

“You still working for that Ringrose bat?” Mrs. Kitteridge asked; she had just ordered two plain doughnuts.

And Kayley said, slipping the doughnuts into a white bag, “No, she fired me.”

“She fired you?” Mrs. Kitteridge’s face showed surprise. Then she said, “What did you do, play with her little Mayflower boat?”

“No. She just called me and said I wasn’t needed anymore. And that there was illness in her house or something.”

“Huh.” Mrs. Kitteridge seemed to be considering something. “Well, her husband’s not well.”

Kayley felt an odd tingling on the tip of her nose. “Is he going to die?” she asked.

Mrs. Kitteridge shook her head. “Worse than that,” she said. Then she said, leaning forward, raising her hand to her cheek, “Her husband’s going dopey-dope.”

“Mr. Ringrose? He is ?”

“That’s what I heard. He was seen out back watering their tulip bed naked. And the tulips are long gone by.”

Kayley looked at Mrs. Kitteridge. “Are you kidding me?”

Mrs. Kitteridge sighed. “Oh, it gets even worse. I’ve told you that much, I might as well tell you the rest. She’s putting him in that nursing home where Miss Minnie was. Can you imagine that? They have to have more money than that. She could afford to put him in the Golden Bridge place, but she’s sticking him out there, and I say—and I have always said this—” Mrs. Kitteridge rapped her hand on the counter twice. “That woman was never nice to him. Not one bit.” Mrs. Kitteridge gave a severe nod to Kayley.

“Oh,” said Kayley, taking this in. “Oh, that’s so, so sad.”

And Mrs. Kitteridge said, “I guess to God it is.”

In two days, Kayley would start high school. The high school was a mile out of town, and her mother would drive her there in the morning, and she would walk back, or maybe a friend would drive her. But it was not near her old house on Maple Avenue, and today she rode her bicycle by that house, and she saw how the renovation had changed it. They had painted it a deep blue, when it had always been a white house, and there were pots of flowers on the newly made front stoop. The back room where her father had died had been removed altogether, and a large porch was there instead. After she rode by it she suddenly turned at the corner and rode her bicycle out over the bridge past the mill to the old nursing home where Miss Minnie had been. She stayed on the other side of the street when she got to the place, and dismounted from her bicycle and looked at the building; it was dark green, a shingled building, and it seemed smaller than it had before. She walked her bike along the side of the road; a few cars whizzed past. She waited for the cars to go by, then crossed the street and walked her bicycle around to the back, where the employees parked. And then, not wanting to be seen by anyone, she went to the side of the building that faced the woods, and she sat down on the gravel there, her bicycle leaning against the wall of the place.

The very top of a tree had started to turn red, and Kayley looked up at it, then looked at the gravel glinting in the sun. She thought about Mrs. Ringrose, how she had started the Silver Squares, and had that fashion show, beginning with the Pilgrims. Oh my God, Kayley thought, leaning her head against the shingled wall and closing her eyes. And her Mayflower boat in her living room. It seemed to Kayley that the history this woman had clung to was no longer important; it would be almost washed away, just a dot left—not just by the Irish, but by so many things that had happened since, the Civil Rights movement, the fact that the world was much smaller now, people connected in new ways Mrs. Ringrose had never imagined.