idea—what it was like to be old and alone. But other days she felt okay. Not wonderful. But she could drive and get her groceries, and she visited her friend Edith at that awful old folks’ home she lived in called Maple Tree Apartments. Then when she came home she was glad to be there, although she could not shake the feeling that it was Jack’s house. She sat in Jack’s chair these days so that she wouldn’t have to look at it gapingly empty. And sometimes as she sat there a deep sadness trembled through her, because she wanted to be living in the house she had built with Henry; that house had been torn down, and she couldn’t even stand to go by the spot. But what a nice house it had been! What a nice man Henry had been! And the sadness would deepen as she looked around this house she lived in—had lived in for almost eight years—and she would think: Honest to God. To sit in the middle of this field when I could still be by the water.
She thought about Jack’s expression the night he died in bed next to her. He had said, “Good night, Olive,” and reached to turn the light off, but first giving her a fleeting smile, which now in her memory seemed to be a smile he gave when he was far away from her. She had lived with him just long enough to begin to recognize these things, the changes in expression—so brief—that indicated he was somewhere else. And she thought he was like that when he said his last words, “Good night, Olive.”
To hell with you, she thought, but she was really hurt by this recognition. He was not with her when he died. Oh, he was with her, he was lying next to her, but only because this was his home—his home with his wife Betsy—and Olive felt (now) that it was not her home, and she felt unsteady in it.
* * *
Then one afternoon she fell.
It was the middle of an afternoon in April, and a storm came in. Olive watched while the clouds moved above the field and then she heard the raindrops landing on the porch, hitting the windows. She rose and went out to the porch. She was only going to take in the cushions from the chairs she had put out recently, and she did not put on a coat or take her cane, but she walked out onto the porch, and as she bent to pick up a blue cushion from the wooden chair, she peered closer and saw that right there on the boards of the porch was a cigarette butt. Olive kept looking at this, she could not figure out where in the world it would have come from. She was really puzzled—and alarmed. But there it was, and it did not look like it had been there that long—certainly not for weeks, the white part of the cigarette was still white, but just flattened. Right next to the chair. Had someone been sitting in this chair smoking while she was away? How could that be?
Olive bent down—she couldn’t figure out later how she fell, but she did. She fell right over, almost on her head, but then she rolled onto her side, between the house and the back of the chair, and she was so surprised by this that her head seemed a little different for a moment; it was just surprise. And then she couldn’t get up. She could not get up.
“Olive, get up,” she said quietly, aloud. “Olive, get up.” She tried and tried, but she did not have the strength in her arm to push herself up. “Get up,” she kept saying, over and over. “Olive, get up—you damned fool. Get up.” The wind shifted slightly, and the rain began to come on her straight as though aimed at her. It was a cold rain, and she felt the drops pelting her face, her arm, her legs. My God, she thought, I’m going to die out here. She had spoken to Christopher the night before on the phone, he wouldn’t think to call her for at least a few more days. And if other people called her—who, Edith?—and got no answer, they would think nothing of it. “Olive, get up, you get up right now,” she said again and again.
It was that she would die of—what would she die of? Exposure? No,