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shit.
”
“Say
shit,
” says Olive, who never uses the word herself.
“Shit,” says Marlene. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“I guess so.” Olive breathes in deeply. “I guess so,” she says again, slowly.
She looks around her with little interest—a picture of a cat is on one wall—and
her glance comes back to Marlene, who is squeezing her nose. “Quite a day,
kiddo. Vomit upstairs, and cigarette butts downstairs.” The woman with the long
gray hair has really shaken Olive up:
Seismic
spells itself across her fog-colored
mind. She says, “That creature who bought Christopher’s house, she’s walking
around putting her cigarettes out in your plants.”
“Oh, her,” says Marlene. “She’s a piece of shit, too.”
“I guess so.” She’s going to tell this to Henry tomorrow. She’ll tell him the
whole thing; only he won’t like hearing the word
shit.
“Olive, could I ask you to do me a favor?”
“I wish you would.”
“Could you, please—” And here the poor woman looks so bereft, dazed, in
her green flowered dress, her brown hair coming loose from its pins. “Before
you leave, could you go upstairs in the bedroom? Turn right at the top of the
stairs. In the closet you’ll find pamphlets, you know, of different places to go.
Could you take them with you? Just take them with you, and throw them all
away. The basket they’re in, too.”
“Of course.”
Marlene has tears running down past her nose. She wipes her face with a bare
hand. “I don’t want to open that closet door, knowing it’s there.”
“Yes,” says Olive. “I can do that.” She brought Henry’s shoes home from the
hospital, put them in a bag in the garage, and they are still there. They were new,
bought just a few days before the last time they pulled into the parking lot of
Shop ’n Save.
“Any other stuff, if you want, Marlene.”
“No. No, Olive. It’s that we sat there and made believe we’d go places
together.” Marlene shakes her head. “Even after Dr. Stanley told us what the
situation was, we’d go through these pamphlets, talking about the trips we’d take
when he got well.” She rubs her face with both hands. “Gosh, Olive.” Marlene
stops and looks at the knife Olive is holding. “Oh, gosh, Olive. I’m so
embarrassed.” And it seems she really is; her cheeks are flushing a deep pink,
now a deep red.
“No need to be,” Olive tells her. “We all want to kill someone at some point.”
Olive’s ready right now to say, if Marlene wants to hear, the different people she
might like to kill.
But Marlene says, “No, not that. Not that. That I sat there with him and we
planned those trips.” She tears at the Kleenex, which is pretty well shredded.
“Gosh, Olive, it was like we believed it. And there he was, losing weight, so
weak—‘Marlene, bring over the basket of trips,’ he’d say, and I would. It makes
me so embarrassed now, Olive.”
An innocent, Olive thinks, gazing at this woman. A real one. You don’t find
them anymore. Boy, you do not.
Olive stands up and walks to the window over the little sink, looking down
onto the driveway. People are leaving now, the last of them; Matt Grearson gets
into his truck, backs out, drives away. And here comes Molly Collins with her
husband, walking over the gravel in her low pumps; she put in a full day’s work,
Molly did, just trying to do her best, Olive thinks. Just a woman with false teeth
and an old husband—who in two shakes will be dead like the rest of them, or
worse, sitting next to Henry in a wheelchair.
She wants to tell Marlene how she and Henry talked about the grandchildren
they would have, the happy Christmases with their nice daughter-in-law. How
only a little more than a year ago they would go to Christopher’s house for
dinner and the tension would be so thick, you could put your hand against it, and
they’d still come home and say to each other what a nice girl she was, how glad
they were that Christopher had this nice wife.
Who, who, does not have their basket of trips? It isn’t right. Molly Collins
said that today, standing out by the church.
It isn’t right.
Well. It isn’t.
She would like to rest a hand on Marlene’s head, but this is not the kind of
thing Olive is especially able to do. So she goes and stands near the chair
Marlene sits on, gazing out that side window there, looking down at the
shoreline, which is wide now that the tide’s almost gone out. She thinks of Eddie
Junior down there skipping stones, and she can only just remember that feeling
herself, being young enough to pick up a rock, throw it out to sea with force, still
young enough to do that, throw that damn stone.
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