sticker?”
“Yes,” Olive said, “that is exactly what I mean.”
Halima said, looking down, running a finger across the table that a lamp sat on, “Do you know when my little brother heard that man became president, he started to cry.” Halima looked up at Olive. “He cried and said, Now we’ll have to go back, and my mother explained to him that he was born here and he didn’t have to leave.”
“Oh Godfrey,” said Olive; briefly she closed her eyes. Then Olive said, “Tell me what it’s like to be you.” Halima looked around the room. Today she wore a dark red robe and a dark headscarf. “By the way,” Olive added, “that peach-colored thing you had on the other day was just lovely.”
Halima smiled slightly and said, “You don’t like this?”
“Not as much,” Olive said. “Too dark.”
Halima told Olive that she had four sisters and two little brothers, and that two of the sisters and one brother lived in Minneapolis. “Why?” Olive asked. And Halima said they liked it there. Then she stood up and said she was going to get started on Olive’s dinner.
When Halima Butterfly did not show up the next day—it was Jane again—Olive felt very bad. She asked Jane where the Somali girl was, and Jane said that she didn’t know.
Olive kept thinking about this, she kept going over in her head why the girl had not shown up; she just hadn’t liked Olive was what Olive thought, and this hurt her feelings and also made her angry.
The next morning when Betty was out doing some errands for her, Olive called the home healthcare place and asked why Halima had not shown up. The woman on the phone said she had no idea, scheduling was not what she did. “Fine,” Olive said, and hung up.
* * *
The next week’s visit to Dr. Rabolinski, Olive drove the car herself, but she had Betty with her. Earlier, she had taken a practice drive into town and then back home—also with Betty. “See?” Betty said. “You’re all good.”
This time Olive had prepared herself. She looked as good as she could for a baggy old woman with a heart attack under her belt; she wore a blue and white jacket she’d discovered in her closet, and when she saw the doctor, she felt almost no attachment to him. This surprised her; and she noticed too—or thought she did—that he was not as nice to her as he had been before. “You’re doing fine,” he said, then shrugged. “What can I say? You are good to go.”
“Ay-yuh,” she said.
“I’ll see you in a month,” he told her. And then, as he was going out the door, he stopped and said, “You must have been a very good mother, Olive.”
She could not have heard him right. “Why in the world do you think that?” she asked as she stuck her legs down over the table.
“Because your son was so often in attendance at the hospital, and he’s called me twice to make sure you’re all right.” The doctor cocked his head slightly. “So you must have been a very good mother.”
Olive was baffled by this. “I don’t know if that’s true,” she said slowly.
“Get dressed and see me in my office,” Dr. Rabolinski said.
In his office, he simply repeated that she was doing fine. And Olive got up and left.
As she drove home, with Big Betty next to her, Olive wondered if her initial feelings for the man had been because she thought he had saved her life. Maybe you fall in love with people who save your life, even when you think it’s not worth saving.
* * *
But in Jack’s house—because now it was Jack’s house once more, and not hers, Olive had felt this increasingly since she had first come home from the hospital—she felt unsteady. She did not feel as she had. She kept thinking: I’m different. After the last day that Betty, and the others, worked for her (Betty had tried to hug her, though Olive only stood there), she felt especially bereft; she felt unwell and tired. But when she told Dr. Rabolinski this the next time she saw him, he said, “You’re doing just fine, Olive. There is no reason you can’t live alone and drive your car. You’re fine now.”
“Ay-yuh,” she said.
At times she could name it. It was almost panic that she felt. “Damn man,” she said, and she meant the doctor, who was still young and had no idea—he had no