very nice. She said she read my poetry and loved it, blah-fucking-blah-blah.” Andrea tugged a stray piece of hair back behind her ear.
Olive finished her egg. She thought surely a poet could find words other than the phrase Andrea had just used. “Use your words,” Olive had told her son, Christopher, when he was small. “Stop whining and use your words.” Now Olive said to Andrea, “My husband—Jack, my second husband—he would have agreed with you about the arrogance.” When the girl made no response to this, Olive asked, “What are you doing up here?”
Andrea exhaled a long sigh. “My father got sick. So—”
“My father killed himself,” Olive said. She started in on her muffin, which she always kept until last.
“Your father did? He committed suicide?”
“That’s right.”
After a moment, Andrea asked, “How?”
“How? Gun.”
“Really,” Andrea said. “I had no idea.” She put both hands on her ponytail and smoothed it over her shoulder. “How old were you?”
“Thirty. Why would you have any idea? I assume your father is not going to kill himself.”
“I think it’s unusual for a woman to use a gun,” Andrea said, picking up the saltshaker and looking at it. “Men, yes, that’s what they do. But women—usually I think it’s pills with women.” She sent the saltshaker spinning just slightly across the table.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“No.” Andrea pulled her fingers through her hair that was just above the ponytail. After a few moments, she said, “My father wouldn’t know how to kill himself. He’s, you know, not right in the head anymore. He never was right in the head. But you know what I mean.”
“You mean he’s demented. But what do you mean he was never right in the head?”
“I dunno.” Andrea seemed deflated now. She shrugged. “He was just always—he was just always so mean.”
Olive knew from Andrea’s poetry that the girl had never liked her father, but Olive could not now seem to remember any particular reason for this, he was not a drunk, she’d have remembered that— Olive said, “So now he’s going to die?”
“Supposedly.”
“And your mother is dead.” Olive knew this; the girl’s poetry had been about that.
“Oh, she passed twenty years ago. She’d had eight kids. I mean, come on.”
“You don’t have any kids, am I right?” Olive glanced up as she pulled apart her muffin.
“No. I had enough of babies growing up.”
“Never mind. Kids are just a needle in your heart.” Olive drummed her fingers on the tabletop, then put the muffin piece into her mouth. After she swallowed, she repeated, “Just a needle in your goddamn heart.”
“How many do you have?”
“Oh, I have just the one. A son. That’s enough. I have a stepdaughter too. She’s lovely. Lovely girl.” Olive nodded. “A lesbian.”
“Does she like you?”
This question surprised Olive. “I think she does,” she said. “Yes, she does.”
“So you have that.”
“It’s not the same. I met her when she was a grown-up, and she lives in California. It’s not like your own kid.”
“Why is your son a needle in your heart?” The girl asked this with hesitancy, as she tore at the orange peel that had garnished her plate.
“Who knows? Born that way, I guess.” Olive wiped her fingers on a napkin. “You can put that in a poem. All yours.”
The girl said nothing, only looked up through the window at the bay.
It was then that Olive noticed the girl’s sweater, a navy-blue thing with a zipper up the front. But the cuffs were grimy, old-looking. Surely the girl could afford some nice clothes. Olive moved her eyes away quickly, as though she’d seen something she ought not to have seen. She said, “Well, it was good of you to let me join you. I’ll be on my way.”
The girl looked at her, startled. “Oh—” she said. “Oh, Mrs. Kitteridge, please don’t go. Have some more coffee. Oh, you’re not drinking coffee. Do you want a cup of coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee anymore,” Olive said. “It doesn’t seem to agree with my bowels. But have some more if you’d like. I’ll wait with you while you have some.” She turned to find the girl who worked here, and the girl came right over and was very pleasant to Andrea. “There you go,” the girl said, smiling—smiling!—at Andrea, and poured her a cup of coffee. “When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.”
Andrea looked at her searchingly. “Tell me how