was upset that day.” She looked up at Olive then and said, “Jerry Skyler died.”
Olive said nothing, just watched her. She was amazed to see tears come into Betty’s eyes.
“Yup,” said Betty, brushing them away with the back of her hand. “I googled him one day and found out he died. He was only sixty-eight. A heart attack, though maybe I shouldn’t tell you that part. He died raking leaves in the back of his house north of Bangor.”
Olive had been ready to yell at her, this woman who had had a cigarette on her porch, who had scared her to death—to the point of moving!—But Olive did not yell. She watched Betty’s face, she saw the tears slipping down over her mouth, the very same way tears had slipped down Olive’s mouth when she had put lipstick on for the doctor she had been in love with. And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She thought of Betty and her stupid bumper sticker, and the child who had been so frightened that Halima Butterfly had told her about, and yet to tell any of this right now to Betty, who was genuinely suffering—as Olive had suffered—seemed cruel, and she kept silent.
After a moment Olive heaved herself out of her chair and brought a Kleenex to Betty, dropping it onto her lap, and then she returned to her seat. Betty blew her nose, wiped at her eyes. “Thanks,” she said.
After a while, Olive asked, “What is your life like, Betty?”
Betty looked at her. “My life?” she said. More tears came over her face. “Oh, you know.” She waved the tissue through the air slightly. “It sucks,” she said, trying to smile.
Olive said, “Well, tell me about it. I’d like to hear.”
Betty was still weeping, but she was smiling more too, and she said, “Oh, it’s just a life, Olive.”
Olive thought about this. She said, “Well, it’s your life. It matters.”
And so Betty told her then about her two marriages that had both gone wrong, three children who desperately needed money, about her son who had developed strep throat when he was twelve and it had affected his brain and he was now always talking about how crazy he felt, her own job for a while delivering newspapers at four o’clock in the morning, how she eventually got herself to school to become a nurse’s aide. Olive listened, sinking into this woman’s life, and she thought that her own life had been remarkably easy compared to things this girl had gone through.
When Betty got done talking, Olive was silent.
For Betty to have carried in her heart this love for Jerry Skyler, what did that mean? It was to be taken seriously, Olive saw this. All love was to be taken seriously, including her own brief love for her doctor. But Betty had kept this love close to her heart for years and years; she had needed it that much.
Olive finally said, leaning forward in her chair, “Here’s what I think, young lady. I think you’re doin’ excellent.” Then she sat back.
What a thing love was.
Olive felt it for Betty, even with that bumper sticker on her truck.
Friend
On a morning in early December, Olive Kitteridge clambered onto the small van that took residents from the Maple Tree Apartments into town to go to the grocery store; it had snowed lightly the night before, a white glistening everywhere. She grabbed hold of the railing that went up the small steps to where the driver waited—a sullen young man with tattoos on his neck—and she sat down in the third seat next to the window. She was the first person to board the van, and this was her first time on it. Olive still had her car, but she had decided to take the van into town today because her friend Edith, who had lived at Maple Tree for a few years, had recently told Olive that she needed to be friendlier to the people who lived here. “Ay-yuh,” Olive had said. “Well, I think they need to be friendlier to me.”
She watched now as the other old people—Godfrey, some of them were positively ancient—climbed on, and then a woman who looked a little younger than most of them got on and sat down next to Olive. “Hello!” the woman said to Olive,