Olive, Again: A Novel by Elizabeth Strout

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.”
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    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.
    And then Kayley thought about Mr. Ringrose, who, in a way, she had never stopped thinking about, the loneliness he must have endured, and was enduring still, now just a few feet away.
    Kayley shook her head, and pulled her arms up to cover her face. At the moment—only for this moment—it was all she