Kitteridge 1 - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Author:Elizabeth Strout
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781588366887
Published: 2008-03-24T14:00:00+00:00

Basket of Trips

Town is the church, and the grange hall, and the grocery store, and these days the grocery store could use a coat of paint. But no one’s about to mention that to the grocer’s wife—a plump, short woman who has brown eyes and two little dimples high up on her cheeks. When she was younger, Marlene Bonney was quite shy, and she would push the numbers on the cash register with a tentativeness, patches of pink spreading over her cheeks; you could see it made her nervous, counting out the change. But she was kind and warm-natured, and would listen carefully, her head bent forward, whenever a customer mentioned a problem they had. The fishermen liked her because she was quick to laugh, a sweet eruption of a deep, soft giggle. And when she made a mistake with the change, as she sometimes did, she would laugh even while blushing clear to her roots. “I guess I’m not going to win any prizes,” she’d say. “No prizes for me.”

Now, on this April day, people stand in the gravelly parking lot next to the church, waiting for Marlene to come out with her kids. Those who speak do so quietly, and there is a great deal of abstracted gazing, not uncommon in these circumstances, and many long glances at the ground. This same gravel parking lot stretches along the road and goes, eventually, up to the big side door of the grocery store, which in the past was often open during the summer months, and where people could see Marlene out back there, playing cards with the kids, or fixing them hot dogs to eat; good kids, always running around the store when they were small, always underfoot.

Molly Collins, standing next to Olive Kitteridge, both of them waiting along with the rest, has just looked around behind her at that side of the grocery store, and with a deep sigh says, “Such a nice woman. It isn’t right.”

Olive Kitteridge, who is big-boned and taller by a head than Molly, reaches into her handbag for her sunglasses, and once she has them on, she squints hard at Molly Collins, because it seems such a stupid thing to say. Stupid—this assumption people have, that things should somehow be right. But she finally answers, “She’s a nice woman, it’s true,” turning and looking across the road at the budded forsythia near the grange hall.

And it is true, Marlene Bonney is sweet—and as thick as molasses, to boot. Years ago it was Olive who taught Marlene math in the seventh grade; Olive thinks she knows better than most how hard it must’ve been for the poor girl to take on that cash register when the time came. Still, the reason Olive has come here today, volunteered to help out, is that she knows Henry would be here if things weren’t as they are; Henry, who went to church every Sunday, believed in this community stuff. But there they are—Marlene has come out of the church, Eddie Junior next to her, and the girls right behind.

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