Pharmacy
For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.
The pharmacy was a small two-story building attached to another building that housed separately a hardware store and a small grocery. Each morning Henry parked in the back by the large metal bins, and then entered the pharmacy's back door, and went about switching on the lights, turning up the thermostat, or, if it was summer, getting the fans going. He would open the safe, put money in the register, unlock the front door, wash his hands, put on his white lab coat. The ritual was pleasing, as though the old store -- with its shelves of toothpaste, vitamins, cosmetics, hair adornments, even sewing needles and greeting cards, as well as red rubber hot water bottles, enema pumps -- was a person altogether steady and steadfast. And any unpleasantness that may have occurred back in his home, any uneasiness at the way his wife often left their bed to wander through their home in the night's dark hours -- all this receded like a shoreline as he walked through the safety of his pharmacy. Standing in the back, with the drawers and rows of pills, Henry was cheerful when the phone began to ring, cheerful when Mrs. Merriman came for her blood pressure medicine, or old Cliff Mott arrived for his digitalis, cheerful when he prepared the Valium for Rachel Jones, whose husband ran off the night their baby was born. It was Henry's nature to listen, and many times during the week he would say, "Gosh, I'm awful sorry to hear that," or "Say, isn't that something?"
Inwardly, he suffered the quiet trepidations of a man who had witnessed twice in childhood the nervous breakdowns of a mother who had otherwise cared for him with stridency. And so if, as rarely happened, a customer was distressed over a price, or irritated by the quality of an Ace bandage or ice pack, Henry did what he could to rectify things quickly. For many years Mrs. Granger worked for him; her husband was a lobster fisherman, and she seemed to carry with her the cold breeze of the open water, not so eager to please a wary customer. He had to listen with half an ear as he filled prescriptions, to make sure she was not at the cash register dismissing a complaint. More than once he was reminded of that same sensation in watching to see that his wife, Olive, did not bear down too hard on Christopher over a homework assignment or a chore left undone; that sense of his attention hovering -- the need to keep everyone content. When he heard a briskness in Mrs. Granger's voice, he would step down from his back post, moving toward the center of the store to talk with the customer himself. Otherwise, Mrs. Granger did her job well. He appreciated that she was not chatty, kept perfect inventory, and almost never called in sick. That she died in her sleep one night astonished him, and left him with some feeling of responsibility, as though he had missed, working alongside her for years, whatever symptom might have shown itself that he, handling his pills and syrups and syringes, could have fixed.
"Mousy," his wife said, when he hired the new girl. "Looks just like a mouse."
Denise Thibodeau had round cheeks, and small eyes that peeped through her brown-framed glasses. "But a nice mouse," Henry said. "A cute one."
And then Jane hated her, this tall woman with her painted face, the hard eyes staring out from under the red felt hat; she didn't want to tell Mrs. Lydia how every morning she and Bobby, early, first thing, took a walk, how they came back and made coffee and ate their bran cereal and read the paper to each other. How they planned their day, went shopping -- for her coat, for a special pair of shoes since he had such trouble now with his feet.
"We bumped into someone else that trip," Mr. Lydia said. "The Shepherds. They were at a golf resort north of the city."
"Small world," Mrs. Lydia said again, tugging at her ear with her gloved hand again, not looking at Jane this time, just looking up the stairs at the balcony.
Olive Kitteridge was moving through the crowd of people. Taller than most, her head was visible as she seemed to say something to her husband, Henry, who nodded, an expression of suppressed mirth on his face.
"Better get back in there," said Bob, nodding toward the inside of the church, touching Jane's elbow.
"Come on," said Mrs. Lydia, tapping her husband's sleeve with a program. "Let's go. Lovely to see you." She wiggled her fingers at Jane, then moved up the stairs.
Jane squeezed past a group of people standing right in the doorway, and she and Bob went back to their pew, her tugging her coat around her, crossing her legs, cold inside their black wool slacks. "He loves her," said Jane, with a tone of admonishment. "That's how he can stand her."
"Mr. Lydia?"
"No. Henry Kitteridge."
Bob didn't answer, and they watched as others came in, took their seats again, the Kitteridges among them. "Miami?" Jane said to her husband. "What was he talking about?" She looked at him.
Bob thrust out his lower lip and shrugged, to indicate he didn't know.
"When were you in Miami?"
"He must have meant Orlando. Remember when I had that account I was closing down there?"
"You bumped into the Lydias at the airport in Florida? You never told me that."
"I'm sure I did. It was ages ago."
The music took over the church. It took up all the space that wasn't filled with people or coats or pews, it took up all the space in Jane Houlton's head. She actually moved her neck back and forth as though to shake off the cumbersome weight of the sound, and realized that she had never liked music. It seemed to bring back all the shadows and aches of a lifetime. Let others enjoy it, these people listening so seriously in their fur coats, their red felt hats, their tiresome lives -- a pressure on her knee, her husband's hand.
She gazed at his hand, spread over her black coat that they had bought together. It was the large hand of an old man; a beautiful hand with the long fingers and the veins rising across; as familiar, almost, as her own hand was to her.
"Are you all right?" He had put his mouth against her ear, but she thought he had whispered too loudly. She made a circular motion with two fingers, their own sign language from years back, Let's go, and he nodded.
"You all right, Janie?" he asked on the sidewalk, his hand under her elbow.
"Oh, I get tired of that heavy music somehow. Do you mind?"
"No. I'd had enough."
In the car, in the darkness and the silence of the car, she felt some knowledge pass between them. And it had been sitting there in church with them, too, like a child pressed between them in the pew, this thing, this presence that had made its way into their evening.
She said quietly, "Oh, God."
"What, Janie?"
She shook her head, and he did not ask again.
A traffic light up ahead turned yellow. He slowed down, drove slowly; he stopped.
Jane blurted out: "I hate her."
"Who?" His tone was surprised. "Olive Kitteridge?"
"Of course not Olive Kitteridge. Why would I hate her? Donna Granger. I hate her. There's something creepy about her. Smug. Your bunny rabbits. I hate her." Jane actually stamped a foot against the floor of the car.
"I can't think it's worth all that emotion, Janie. I mean, really, do you?" asked Bob, and from the corner of her eye, she saw that he didn't turn his head to look at her as he asked this.
He moved his legs aside. "Come," he said, patting the bed. "Sit down. I may be a rich Republican, though I'm not that rich, in case you were secretly hoping. Anyway -- " He sighed and shook his head, the sunlight from the windows catching his eyes, making them very blue. "Anyway, Olive, you can tell me anything, that you beat your son black and blue, and I won't hold it against you. I don't think I will. I've beaten my daughter emotionally. I didn't speak to her for two years, can you imagine such a thing?"
"I did hit my son," Olive said. "Sometimes when he was little. Not just spanked. Hit."
Jack Kennison nodded one nod.
She stepped into the room, put her handbag on the floor. He didn't sit up, just stayed there, lying on the bed, an old man, his stomach bulging like a sack of sunflower seeds. His blue eyes watched her as she walked to him, and the room was filled with the quietness of afternoon sunlight. It fell through the window, across the rocking chair, hit broadside the wallpaper with its brightness. The mahogany bed knobs shone. Through the curved-out window was the blue of the sky, the bayberry bush, the stone wall. The silence of this sunshine, of the world, seemed to fold over Olive with a shiver of ghastliness, as she stood feeling the sun on her bare wrist. She watched him, looked away, looked at him again. To sit down beside him would be to close her eyes to the gaping loneliness of this sunlit world.
"God, I'm scared," he said, quietly.
She almost said, "Oh, stop. I hate scared people." She would have said that to Henry, to just about anyone. Maybe because she hated the scared part of herself -- this was just a fleeting thought; there was a contest within her, revulsion and tentative desire. It was the sudden memory of Jane Houlton in the waiting room that caused Olive to walk to the bed -- the freedom of that ordinary banter, because Jack, in the doctor's office, had needed her, had given her a place in the world.
His blue eyes were watching her now; she saw in them the vulnerability, the invitation, the fear, as she sat down quietly, placed her open hand on his chest, felt the thump, thump of his heart, which would someday stop, as all hearts do. But there was no someday now, there was only the silence of this sunny room. They were here, and her body -- old, big, sagging -- felt straight-out desire for his. That she had not loved Henry this way for many years before he died saddened her enough to make her close her eyes.
What young people didn't know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again.
She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.