I thought, I’ll go see Mrs. Kitteridge. How are you?”
“Ghastly,” Olive said. Then she said, “Why didn’t you come back?”
Halima said, “I don’t like to drive all the way to Crosby from Shirley Falls, so when I can have a client nearer to me I take them instead.” She shrugged her robed shoulders. Then she smiled her amazing smile of bright white teeth. “But I’m here now.”
“All right then,” Olive said.
Seated in the living room, Olive told Halima about her fall and the cigarette butt. Halima looked concerned. “I don’t like that,” she said. “You should not be living alone.”
Olive made a noise of disgust, waving her hand to indicate that this was a stupid thing to say. But Halima sat forward, pointing a finger at Olive. “In my culture,” she said, “you would never be alone.”
Olive didn’t care for that. “Well, in my culture,” Olive said, pointing her own finger toward the woman, “sons get married, go away, and never come back.”
* * *
The Maple Tree Apartments had a waiting period of twelve months. But on the telephone one night, Christopher said he had figured out how to get her in there in just four months. “Mom,” he said, “I signed you up after your heart attack just in case. So you’re on the waiting list.” Then Christopher said, “But, Mom, listen to me carefully. You’re going to have to sell that house. We need you to live in assisted living, but you can live in the independent living part of it. You can’t live alone in that house anymore.”
Olive was very tired. “Okay,” she said.
* * *
—
And so that was that. As spring broke through, Olive noticed it and felt glad. The forsythia bushes first, and also the snowdrops by the house. But then it snowed lightly one night, and in the morning the forsythia looked like scrambled eggs. Then the daffodils came out, and eventually the lilac trees. She noticed these on the road to the Maple Tree Apartments, where she went these days with more frequency to visit her friend Edith, whose husband, Buzzy, had recently died. Edith kept going on about what a wonderful man he had been; Olive had never particularly liked him, but she sat while Edith told her once more how he had taken a fall and been sent “over the bridge,” as Edith said it was called, the place across an actual little bridge where people went when they had strokes and things, and then how he had died so suddenly….Oh, it was tiresome to listen to. But Edith said she was glad that Olive would soon live there as well, although she said it only once and Olive would have liked to hear it more.
Whenever she entered and left the Maple Tree Apartments, Olive looked—naturally—at the whole thing with different eyes. The people seemed so old. Godfrey, there were men shuffling along, and women all bent over. People with walkers that had little seats in them. Well, this was to be her future. But in truth, it did not feel real to her.
* * *
And then one day when she was sitting in Jack’s chair she heard a car drive into the driveway and she said out loud, “Who the hell is that,” and she got her cane—suddenly hoping that it was Halima Butterfly again—and went to the door, and it was Betty getting out of her truck. As Olive opened the door, Betty said “Hi, Olive!” in a voice that Olive thought was false in its cheerfulness.
“Come in,” said Olive.
Betty sat right down in the chair she had always sat in, and she dropped her pocketbook onto the floor beside her. “How are you?” Betty asked.
And Olive told her. She told her she was moving to the Maple Tree Apartments at the end of the summer, and she told her how she had fallen and almost died (this is how she put it to Betty), and then she told her how it was over a cigarette butt that she had found by the chairs on the porch.
“Oh,” said Betty. “That was probably mine. Sorry.”
Olive had to take a minute to allow this to register. “What do you mean?” she asked.
Betty said, “I came over here one day and you weren’t home so I sat out there and had a cigarette.”
“You smoke?” Olive said. “Are you kidding me?”
Betty looked down at her feet, she had on sneakers with no shoelaces. “Only when I’m really upset. And I