friends. When Amy was sixteen years old, there was a crisis. Isabelle found out that Amy had been having a relationship with her math teacher. “A sexual one,” Isabelle said. Isabelle had become furious. “Do you know what I did?” She looked at Olive, and Olive saw that the woman’s eyes were smaller and becoming red.
“Tell me,” Olive said.
“Amy had always had beautiful hair. Long, wavy yellow hair, her father’s hair, not mine, and when I found out about that math teacher—Olive, I walked into that girl’s bedroom with a pair of shears—and—and I cut her hair off.” Isabelle looked away and took her glasses off and drew a hand across her eyes.
“Huh.” Olive considered this. “Well, I guess I can understand,” she said.
“Can you?” Isabelle looked at her, putting her glasses back on. “I can’t. Oh, I mean I did it, so I should understand it, but, oh, the memory haunts me, what a thing to do to that child!”
“Does she like you now?” Olive asked.
And Isabelle’s face broke into gladness. “Oh, she loves me. I don’t understand how she can, I really was not a good mother, I was so quiet and she had no friends, but yes, she lives in Des Moines now, and she has one son who is thirty-five and living in California doing computer stuff. But yes, Amy does love me, and she’s the reason I can afford this place.”
Olive asked to see a photograph of the girl, and Isabelle pointed behind Olive, and Olive turned around and saw a whole array of photos. The girl was much older than Olive would have pictured, but then she remembered how young Isabelle was when she had her. Amy wore her grayish hair short now, but her face was full and had a sweetness to it. “Huh,” Olive said. She looked at the photos carefully.
“Well, I wasn’t a good mother either,” Olive said, turning back to face Isabelle. “But my son loves me. Now. After I had my heart attack he seemed to grow up.” She said, “What does Amy do?”
Isabelle said, “She’s a doctor. She’s an oncologist.”
“My word,” Olive said. “Well, that’s something. Working with cancer patients all day, my goodness.”
“Oh, I think it has to be very hard, but she seems to find it fascinating. You know, her first little boy, he died when he was eighteen months old. Not of cancer. SIDS. And she was in nursing school, and then she just kept right on going. She’s married to a doctor as well. He’s a pediatrician.”
Somehow Olive found this astonishing. She said, “Well, my son is also a doctor, in New York City.”
“New York!” Isabelle said, and asked what kind of doctor he was.
“A podiatrist,” said Olive. Adding, “People walk a lot in New York. He has a blazing practice.” She looked over at the many little figurines that were on a shelf by the window.
“Those were my mother’s,” Isabelle said.
“So when did you marry?” Olive asked, looking back at her.
“Oh, I married a wonderful man, he was a pharmacist—”
“I married a pharmacist!” Olive almost yelled this. “My husband’s pharmacy was right here in Crosby, and he was a lovely, lovely man. Henry was made of love.”
“So was my husband,” Isabelle said. “I married him right about the time Amy went to college. He died last year, and our house was just too much for me, and so Amy got me into this place.”
“Well,” said Olive. “Well, well, well. We both married pharmacists.”
Isabelle said, “My husband’s name was Frank.”
“And he was a Franco,” said Olive. “What we used to call a Frenchie.” And Isabelle said yes, and wasn’t that funny, because back when she worked in that shoe factory, thinking she was superior to the women who worked there, she would never have thought she’d marry a Franco. But she did. And he was wonderful. He’d had a wife who’d died very young, before they’d had any children, and what this man did after his wife died, every day in the spring and summer and fall, was to go home after work—he and this young wife had had a house outside of Shirley Falls with fields all around—and he would get on his mower and he just mowed those fields. Mowed and mowed and mowed. And then he met Isabelle.
“Did he stop mowing?” Olive asked.
Isabelle said, “He didn’t mow as much.”
Olive felt a warmth move through her; she stuck her cane onto the ground and pushed herself out of the chair.