Olive, Again - Elizabeth Strout Page 0,6

looking at the living room; it was a spacious room with a low blue couch on metal legs that stretched along a few feet from the wall facing the television, then went at a right angle along the other area of the room, with a metal-legged glass coffee table in front. Then Jack turned in his chair and stared through the windows at the field of grass and the trees beyond, their leaves bright green. He and Betsy had agreed that they liked the view of this field more than any view of the water, and as he remembered this a warmth trembled through him. Finally he rose, poured himself some whiskey, and boiled four hot dogs on the stove. He kept shaking his head while he opened a can of baked beans. “Betsy,” he said out loud a few times. When he was through eating and had rinsed the dishes—he did not put them in the dishwasher, that seemed too much trouble—he had one more glass of whiskey and got to thinking of Betsy being so in love with that Tom Groger fellow. Oh, what a strange thing a life was—

But filled with a sense of goodwill—the day was almost over and the whiskey was working—Jack sat at his computer and googled the fellow, Tom Groger. He found the man; he was apparently still teaching at that private high school for girls in Connecticut; he’d be eight years younger than Jack. But only girls? Still? Jack scrolled through and saw they’d been accepting young men for about ten years. Then he found a small picture of Tom Groger; he had gray hair now, he was thin, you could see that in his face, which seemed pleasant enough, and very bland to Jack’s eyes. There was an email address for him attached to the school’s site. So Jack wrote to him. “My wife, Betsy (Arrow as you would have known her), died seven months ago, and I know she loved you very much in her youth. I thought you might want to know about her death.” He pressed SEND.

Jack sat back and looked at the light that was changing on the trees. These long, long evenings; they were so long and beautiful, it just killed him. The field was darkening, the trees behind it were like pieces of black canvas, but the sky still sent down the sun, which sliced gently across the grass on the far end of the field. His mind went back over the day and it seemed he could make no sense of it. Had that guy really had a boner? It seemed impossible, yet Jack knew—in a way, he knew—the feeling of anger and power that might have produced it. If the guy had even been getting one. And then Jack thought of the ants that were still going about trying to get their sand wherever they needed it to go. They seemed almost heartbreaking to him, in their tininess and their resilience.

Two hours later, Jack checked his email, hoping his daughter might have written and hoping as well that Olive Kitteridge might have reappeared in his life. After all, she had been the one who emailed him the first time, about her son, and he had answered about his daughter. He had even told Olive one day about his affair with Elaine Croft, and Olive had not seemed to judge him. She had spoken of a schoolteacher that she herself had fallen in love with years ago—an almost-affair, she called it—and the man had died in a car accident one night.

Now as he checked his email he saw that he had forgotten (forgotten!) about Tom Groger, but there was a reply from TGrogerWhiteschool.edu. Jack squinted through his reading glasses. “I know about the death of your wife. Betsy and I were in contact for many years. I don’t know if I should tell you this, or not, but she spoke to me of your own dalliance, and perhaps I should tell you—I don’t know, as I said, if I should tell you or not—but there was a period of time when Betsy and I met in a hotel in Boston, and also New York. Perhaps you already know that.”

Jack pushed back his chair from the desk; the wheels rumbled against the hardwood floor. He pulled the chair back in and read the message again. “Betsy,” he murmured, “why, you son of a gun.” He took his glasses off, wiped his arm across