just took the dishes and washed them while Ethel remained at the dining-room table, drumming her fingers on it. They could both hear, from Lisa’s room, her voice, but could not make out the words. But Lisa talked and talked and talked, and after a while Ethel said, “Come on, Teddy,” and took the dog out for a walk. When she came back she asked, “Still talking?” And after a moment Fergus said, “Yes.” Then he said, “Teddy, tell your mother I’m going for a drive,” and he had gone out in his truck with the intention of taking his Civil War uniform to the garbage can out near the Point and dumping it in there. In the truck he had said out loud a few times, “Creag Dhubh!” which was the war cry of the MacPherson clan, and then he stopped it; he thought of the Highland Games and wondered if that was foolishness too: standing there every summer in his kilt yelling that with the rest of the clan.
Now he said to Anita, “What do you think of Olive Kitteridge?”
“Olive?” said Anita. “Oh, I’ve always liked her myself. She’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I like her.” After a moment she said “Why do you ask?” and Fergus just shook his head. Anita gave a small laugh. “She was the one—did Ethel tell you this?—who suggested to us when we were filling out those fishing licenses and they asked for the weight of the person, Olive said, ‘Why don’t you ask them what they think a game warden would say about how much they weighed?’ It was kind of brilliant. You know, you get these fatties in there and you don’t want to just say, Hey, how much do you weigh? So we started doing that.”
“Anita,” Fergus said, turning to her. “This is a hell of a world we live in.”
“Oh, I know,” Anita said casually. She nodded. “Yuh, I know.” She added, “Always has been, I suspect.”
“Do you think so?” Fergus asked. He looked at her through his sunglasses. “Do you think it has always been this bad, really? It seems to me like things are getting crazier.”
Anita shrugged. “I think they’ve always been crazy. That’s my view.”
And so Fergus thought about this.
After another few moments he said, “Things all right with you, Anita?”
She gave a sigh that made her cheeks expand for a moment. “Nah.” She looked both ways on the road and said, “Gary’s been a mess since he got laid off, and that was a few years ago, and my kids are crazy.” She looked at Fergus and made a circle around her ear with her forefinger. She said, “I mean, they are really crazy.” She shook her head. “You know what my oldest son is into? He watches some Japanese reality show on his computer where the contestants sniff each other’s butts.”
Fergus looked over at her. “God,” he said. Then he said, “Come on, Anita, the world has certainly gotten crazier.”
“Oh, maybe a little, who knows.” Anita shrugged slightly.
Fergus finally said, looking at the ground, “Well, kids. What can you do.”
“Nothing,” said Anita. “How are your girls?”
“Oh, they’re crazy too. Batty as can be.” He saw the tow truck across the field and motioned toward it and Anita said, “Oh, good.”
“You’re going to need cash for the tow,” Fergus said. “You got it?”
“No, just my credit card.”
Fergus reached into his pocket and gave Anita his roll of cash. He waited until the tow truck was driving away, Anita sitting in the front seat of it, waving to him, and then he got back into his truck and drove to the Point and threw his uniform into the garbage, pushing the bag all the way down into the bin. He wondered about Anita’s children, how crazy they were, or were not. Watching people sniff each other’s butts? Jesus God. That was pretty goddamn crazy stuff.
* * *
—
Back home, he was surprised once again to see Laurie’s car in the driveway, but no Teddy sat in it, and when he walked into the house he heard his television on. He knew it was his, and not Ethel’s, because of the kind of sound it made. He went straight into the living room and found Ethel and his daughters all sitting on his lounge chair, Ethel on the front edge of it, and one girl on each arm, and he was about to open his mouth and say What the hell when he