Olive Kitteridge (21 page)

Julie came back to the house like a walking Barbie doll, and the three of them were at the screen door when she came in. “Mommy,” said Julie, quietly. Her eyes weren't quite right. “This isn't happening, is it?”

Uncle Kyle showed up with pills. Jim spoke to the limousine driver and then went off to the church. The limousine drove away, catching the leaves of a poplar tree in its back fender above the tire, and Winnie sat on the steps in her bridesmaid dress. After a while her father came back. “Guess you can take that off, Winnie-doodle,” he said, but Winnie just kept sitting there. Her father went inside, and when he came back out, he said, “Julie's resting on our bed along with your mother.” Winnie figured that meant Uncle Kyle had drugged them both.

She sat on the steps until she had to go to the bathroom. She didn't like going to the bathroom in the house anymore, behind the curtain like that, when everyone was home. But no one was around when she went inside. She could hear her father downstairs in the cellar, and her parents' bedroom door was closed. In a few minutes, though, the door opened and her mother walked out. She had on her old blue skirt, with a pink sweater, and she didn't look the least bit drugged.

         

Jim Harwood had been building a boat for years. It was going to be a big boat—the frame took up a lot of the cellar. For almost a year he hadn't done anything more than spread the blueprints out onto the living room floor and look at them each night. But finally he went into the cellar and set up two sawhorses. Every night the family could hear the electric saw buzzing, and sometimes the sound of hammering, and very slowly the curved-out skeleton of a boat began to appear. The boat stayed in its skeleton shape for a long time. Jim kept going down there night after night to work on it. “It's at the slow point now, Winnie-doodle,” he said. He had to press pieces of wood in clamps to get them to arch the right way, and then he'd varnish the wood carefully and put over each nail gummy cement that took four days to dry.

“How're you going to get it out of here when it's done?” Winnie asked him one night, as she sat watching on the cellar stairs.

“Good question, isn't it?” he said. He explained how he'd figured it out beforehand, mathematically, measuring the cellar door, and the circumference of the hull, and that theoretically if he turned it at a certain angle, it should be able to get through the door when the time came. “But I'm beginning to wonder,” he said.

Winnie wondered, too. The boat was looking awfully big. “Well, then it will be like a ship in a bottle,” she said, “like the ones at Moody's store.”

“That's right,” said her father. “It'll be kind of like that, I guess.”

When Winnie was smaller, she used to play in the cellar with Julie. Sometimes Julie would play store with her, with the canned food their mother bought, pushing it across a table pretending to ring it up. Now the cellar was pretty much taken over by the boat and her father's tools. He had built shelves along the wall; up on top was an old rifle that had been around for years, and on the shelves below were wooden boxes filled with cords and nails and bolts, separated according to size.

         

Sun streamed through the window over the kitchen sink. Winnie could see dust particles floating through the air. “Now,” said her mother, putting down her coffee cup, “let's get the day figured out. Daddy's going back to the school for a bit, I'm going to feed my roses, and what are you girls up to?” She raised her eyebrows and tapped her painted fingernails on the table.

Julie and Winnie didn't say anything. Winnie put her finger on the top of the syrup and then into her mouth.

“Winnie, please, don't be a pig,” her mother said, standing up, putting her coffee cup into the sink. “Julie, you'll be a lot better off when you figure out what to
do.
”

One thing Anita had found to do the day there wasn't a wedding was write Bruce a letter. She told him she would shoot him if she ever saw him again, if he ever came close to her daughter. “That's a federal crime, I think,” Jim had told her quietly. “Putting a threat in the mail.”

“Federal crime be damned,” Anita said. “He's the one who did a federal crime.”

Winnie remembered Cliff Mott telling her mother in the grocery store to stop her crazy talk. It was a strange feeling—to go from being proud of your pretty mother to wondering what people said about her, if maybe she was nuts; and Winnie suddenly thought how her mother didn't have close friends the way other mothers did. She didn't talk on the phone or go shopping with anyone.

Now Winnie sat with Julie at the kitchen table, and saw through the window her mother walking around to the rosebushes, a trowel in her hand. “You know what this is all about, don't you?” Julie said quietly. “Sex.”

Winnie nodded, but she didn't know, exactly. The sun, bright in the kitchen, was giving her a headache.

“She can't stand that I had sex with him.”

Winnie got up and dried a plate and put it away. Julie was staring straight in front of her, blankly, like she wasn't really looking at anything. Winnie had seen her mother looking that way sometimes. “Winnie,” Julie said, still staring, “always lie to Mom. Remember I said that to you. Just lie. Lie your head off.”

Winnie dried another plate.

The gist of it was that Bruce had gotten scared. He didn't want to break up with Julie, he just didn't want to marry her. He wanted to live with her instead. Anita had told Julie that if she wanted to live like a common slut with a man who had left her so publicly at the altar, she could expect to never come home again.

“She doesn't mean it,” Winnie had said to Julie. “People live with each other all over the place.”

“You want to bet? You want to bet she doesn't mean it?” Julie had said. And Winnie had felt something almost like car sickness; she guessed she didn't want to bet on anything where their mother was concerned.

         

“Paint a picture. Read a book. Hook a rug.” Anita's hand slapped the table with each suggestion. Julie wasn't answering. She sat nibbling a cracker while Anita and Winnie had soup; they had made it through another day—it was Saturday lunch. “Clean the windows,” Anita said. “Winnie, don't drink from the bowl like a pig.” Anita wiped her mouth with a paper towel, which is what they used for napkins. “What you
should
do is call Beth Marden and see about having your job back at the nursery school this fall.” Anita stood and put her bowl into the sink.

“No,” said Julie.

“Say,
I
know.” Her mother was pleased about this one, Winnie could tell. When her mother's eyes got shiny like that, it made Winnie want to hug her, the way you'd want to hug some child who'd gotten confused about something.

“Oatmeal cookie dough,” Anita said. She nodded at Julie, then at Winnie. “We'll make a batch and we won't bake
any.
We'll just eat it all as dough.”

Julie didn't say anything. She started picking at her nail.

“So, what do you say?” Anita asked.

“I don't think so,” Julie said, glancing up at her. “I mean, thank you, though—it was a nice idea.”

Anita's face got blank, like she couldn't find the expression to put on it. “Julie,” Winnie said. “Come on, it'll be fun.” She got up and brought out a bowl and a spoon and the measuring cups.

Anita walked out of the kitchen and they heard the front door open and close. Anita was supposed to be working today at her job as a cashier at the hospital's coffee shop. She had called in sick. Through the window Winnie saw their mother move past the bayberry bushes and head down the road to where her goldfish pool was. The first year Anita made the goldfish pool, she let the fish freeze in the ice for the winter; she said she'd heard you could do that, that they'd thaw out in the spring. Winnie used to scrape the snow off sometimes to look at the blurry orange spots in the ice.

“I guess I blew that, huh,” Julie said. She sat with her chin in her hands.

Winnie didn't know if she should start the cookie dough or not. She took some butter out of the refrigerator and the telephone began to ring. “Get that,” Julie said, sitting up straight. “Quick.” She was in the chair by the corner, and she started pushing at the other chairs that were in her way. The phone rang another ring.

“Are you home?” Winnie asked. “You know, if it's Bruce or something?”

“Winnie, just
get
it,” Julie said. “Before Mom hears it. Hurry. Yes, of
course
I'm home.”

“Hello?” Winnie said.

“Who,” Julie mouthed. “Whoo?”

“Hello,” said Jim. “How's everything?”

“Hi, Daddy,” Winnie said.

Julie turned and left the kitchen.

“I'm just checking in,” said Jim. “Checking in.”

When Winnie hung up, the phone started to ring again. “Hello?” she said. No one said anything. “Hello?” she said again. Through the phone she heard the sound of a tiny bell.

“Winnie,” said Bruce. “I want to talk to Julie without your mother around.”

“Here I am,” said Anita, coming through the back door. “What's the story with the cookie dough? You kids decide to make it or not?”

“I don't know,” Winnie said, still holding the phone.

“Who's that?” her mother asked.

“Okay, goodbye,” Winnie said into the phone, and hung up.

“Who was that?” her mother said. “Was that Bruce? Winnifred, tell me, was that Bruce?”

Winnie turned around. “It was Daddy,” she said, not looking at her mother. “He'll be home pretty soon.”

“Oh,” said her mother. “Well.”

Winnie put a stick of butter in the bowl and tried to smoosh it with a spoon. Moody's store, she thought. The bell she'd heard when Bruce called was the little bell on the screen door at Moody's.

Anita said, “One of the fish has that fungus again.”

         

Julie was down on the shore, sitting on a rock not much bigger than her bottom, staring out at the water. She turned her head slightly when Winnie's feet made a sound on the seaweed, then she looked back at the water. Winnie turned over rocks, looking for white periwinkles. She used to collect them when she was little, watching the way their muscly foot would cling to the rock, and then close up tight when she touched it with her hand. But today Winnie left them alone. The desire to collect them was gone, it was only habit that made her look. A lobster boat passed by, and Winnie waved. It was good manners to wave to someone in a boat.

“Bruce called,” she said. Julie turned her head. “And it wasn't from Boston either, I think. I think he was up at Moody's.” A loud bang sounded from up by the road.

“He called?” Julie said. There was another bang.

“What is that?” Winnie said. “Fireworks?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Julie said, scrambling up over the rocks. “Winnie, that was a gun.”

         

Anita was in the driveway holding the rifle with both her hands, but carefully, sort of, not aiming it at anything. “Hi there,” she said. Her eyes were shiny, and there were drops of sweat in the pale pockets of skin right below them.

“What are you
doing
?” Julie said. Anita looked back at the rifle in her hands, looking down at the end of it. “Mom,” Julie said.

“He's all right,” said Anita. She kept looking at the gun, peering at the trigger. “He drove up and drove away—that's all.” Her finger was on the trigger. “This hasn't been used in years,” she said. “I think it got jammed. Don't these things sometimes get jammed?”

“Mom,” said Winnie, and there was this sharp, short crack of a sound and the gravel in the driveway sprayed out. Julie screamed and Anita screamed, only hers was a surprised shout really, but Julie's scream kept on going.

Anita held the gun away from herself. “Goodness,” she said. Julie ran to the house yelling. Anita was rubbing her arm.

“Mommy,” Winnie said. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, sweetie,” she answered, brushing a hand across her forehead. “It's kind of hard to say.”

         

This time Anita did take a pill, Winnie saw her take it, obediently at the kitchen sink when Uncle Kyle asked her to, and then she went to bed. Uncle Kyle asked Julie if Bruce was the type to press charges, and Julie and Jim both said no, and then Julie asked Jim if she could call Bruce on his cell phone later just to make sure, and Jim said yes, she could do that, that Anita would probably sleep right through until morning.

Winnie went out the back door and around to the side of the house where there were ferns and lily leaves pressed against the foundation, and she looked into her mother's bedroom window. Anita lay on her side with her hands tucked under her cheeks, her eyes closed, her mouth partly open. She seemed bigger than usual; the tops of her arms and her bare ankles were pale and fleshier than Winnie had noticed before. There was something deeply uncomfortable about the sight, as though Winnie had come across her mother naked. She went down to the shore and gathered up some starfish and laid them out on a big rock above the tide line to dry.