“Well.” Olive was slightly taken aback; she didn’t know how to explain it. “It’s just that you don’t count anymore, and there is something freeing about that.”
“I don’t understand,” the girl said. And what shot through Olive’s mind was the thought: You’re honest.
Olive said, “I don’t think I can explain this well. But you go through life and you think you’re something. Not in a good way, and not in a bad way. But you think you are something. And then you see”—and Olive shrugged in the direction of the girl who had served the coffee—“that you no longer are anything. To a waitress with a huge hind end, you’ve become invisible. And it’s freeing.” She watched Andrea’s face and saw that it was struggling with something.
Finally the girl said, “Well, I envy you.” And she laughed, and Olive saw that her teeth were bad; she wondered briefly why she had not seen this in photos of the girl. “I envy you for ever thinking you were something,” Andrea said, her voice throaty.
“Oh, now stop it, Andrea. Last I heard you were Poet Laureate of this country a few years back.”
“Yeah,” said Andrea. “I was.”
* * *
—
As they walked toward Olive’s car, Olive going faster than she would have on her own, the girl rummaged in her coat pocket and the next thing Olive knew a plume of cigarette smoke was going over her. Olive felt a deep tremor of disappointment, and she thought: Well, she’s just a L’Rieux. That’s all she is. Famous or not.
Andrea said, as they stood by Olive’s car, lifting her hand with the cigarette held between two fingers, “It’s all about class now, smoking. It’s like shooting heroin, but that’s not really a class thing anymore.” And then—and this surprised Olive like hell—the girl wrapped her arms around Olive and said, “It was so nice to see you, Mrs. Kitteridge.” Olive thought her hair might catch on fire from the cigarette in the girl’s hand.
“You too,” said Olive, and she got into her car and started it, and backed away slowly, not looking out the window in the direction of the girl—it was a job to back a car up these days. All the way home she told Jack about what had happened; it was Jack, her second husband, whom she seemed to want to tell this to.
* * *
—
When she spoke on the telephone that night to her son, Christopher, who lived in New York City, she mentioned seeing the girl, and he said, “Who’s Andrea L’Rieux? You mean one of the million L’Rieuxs in that family out on East Point Road?”
“Yes,” Olive said, “the one who became Poet Laureate.”
“Became what?” Christopher asked, not especially nicely, and Olive understood that Christopher did not follow Poets Laureate or anyone with whom he had grown up, though Andrea was younger than he was. “She became the Poet Laureate of the United States of America,” Olive said, and Christopher said, “Well, whoop-dee-do.”
When she told her stepdaughter, Cassie, on the telephone, the child was far more appreciative. “Oh, Olive, how nice! Wow.”
And when she told the owner of the bookstore—Olive walked in the next day with the sole purpose of telling him this—he said, “Hey, that’s very, very cool. Andrea L’Rieux, man, she’s just amazing.”
“Yup,” Olive said. “We had a nice chat. We had breakfast together. She was quite nice. Seemed very ordinary.”
She called her friend Edith, whose husband, Buzzy, had helped her buy the car; they lived in the assisted-living place out by Littlehale’s Farm; and Edith was pretty excited for her as well. “Olive, you’re the kind of person people want to talk to.”
“I don’t know about that,” Olive said, but then she thought that what Edith said was true. “She seemed a lonely child,” Olive said. “As though all her fame and whatnot has meant nothing to her. Sad child. Ratty clothes, smoking her head off. Really, Edith, she was a lonely thing.”
For a couple of weeks Olive waited to hear from Andrea. Each morning when she checked the mail, she realized she was waiting for a card, an old-fashioned, handwritten card that said, How lovely it was to see you, Mrs. Kitteridge. Let’s stay in touch! The girl could get her address from the Internet. But no card came, and after a while Olive stopped waiting for it. When she saw in the newspaper that Severin L’Rieux had died, she wondered if Andrea was still in town, most likely she had