Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Author:Elizabeth Strout [Strout, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Adult, Contemporary, Pulitzer
ISBN: 9781400062089
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-03-25T23:16:00+00:00

Tulips

People thought the Larkin couple would move after what happened. But they didn’t move—perhaps they had nowhere to go. Their blinds remained drawn, however, day and night. Although sometimes in the dusk of winter, Roger Larkin would be found shoveling his driveway. Or in the summer, after the grass got high and sad-looking, you might find him out mowing the lawn. In both cases he wore a hat far down over his face and never looked up when someone drove by. Louise, there was never any sight of at all. Apparently she’d been in a hospital down in Boston for a while—the daughter lived near Boston, so that would make sense—but Mary Blackwell, who was an X-ray technician in Portland, said Louise had spent time in the hospital there. What was interesting was that Mary was criticized for reporting this, even though at the time there wasn’t a soul in town who wouldn’t have chopped off a baby finger for news of any kind. But there was that small outpouring against Mary. With the HIPAA privacy laws these days, she could have lost her job, people said. Remind me never to have shock treatments in Portland, people said. And Cecil Green, who brought hot coffee and doughnuts to the reporters who hung around the house those days, took a scolding from Olive Kitteridge.

“What in hell ails you?” Olive demanded over the phone. “Feeding the vultures like that—good God.” But Cecil was known to be a little “slow,” and Henry Kitteridge asked his wife to leave the fellow alone.

How the Larkins got groceries, nobody knew. It was assumed the daughter from Boston must have some hand in getting her parents food, because once a month or so there would be a car parked in the driveway with a Massachusetts license plate, and while she was never seen in the local grocery store, perhaps she brought with her her husband, whom nobody in the town of Crosby would recognize anymore, and maybe he did some shopping in Mardenville.

Had the Larkins stopped going to visit their son? Nobody knew, and after a while people did not talk too much about it; sometimes people driving past the house—large and square, painted pale yellow—even turned their heads away, not wanting to be reminded of what could happen to a family that had seemed as pretty and fresh as blueberry pie.

It was Henry Kitteridge, responding in the middle of the night to a police call that the alarm in his pharmacy had gone off (a raccoon had made his way inside), who saw the Larkins pulling out of their driveway, Roger driving, Louise—presumably Louise, for the woman had a scarf around her head and was wearing dark glasses—sitting motionless beside him. It was two o’clock in the morning, and that’s when Henry understood that this couple came and went under cover of night; that most likely, most certainly, they would drive to Connecticut to visit the son—but they did it with a furtiveness, and he thought perhaps they would always live this way.

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