Free Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

in the church and began to play, and it didn’t surprise her then, or now. “My hands are hungry,” she would say to her mother when she was young, and it was like that—a hunger. The church had given her mother a key, and these days Angie could still go there anytime and play the piano.
    Behind her she heard the door open, felt the momentary chill, saw the tinsel on the tree sway, and heard the loud voice of Olive Kitteridge say, “Too damn bad. I like the cold.”
    The Kitteridges, when they came alone to the Warehouse, tended to come early and did not sit in the lounge first but went straight through to the dining room. Still, Henry would always call out, “Evening there, Angie,” smiling broadly on his way through, and Olive would wave her hand over her head in a kind of hello. Henry’s favorite song was “Good Night, Irene,” and Angie would try to remember to play this later as the Kitteridges walked back through on their way out. Lots of people had favorite songs, and Angie would sometimes play them, but not always. Henry Kitteridge was different. She always played his song because whenever she saw him, it was like moving into a warm pocket of air.
    Tonight Angie was shaky. There were nights, now, when her vodka did not do what it had done for many years, which was to make her happy and make everything feel pleasantly at a distance. Tonight, as sometimes happened now, she felt a little queer in the head—off-kilter. She made sure to keep a smile on her face and didn’t look at anyone except Walter Dalton, who sat at the end of the bar. He blew her a kiss. She winked, a tiny gesture; you would have thought it was a blink except she did it with only one eye.
    There was a time when Malcolm Moody loved to see her blink like that. “God, but you get me going,” he’d say on those afternoons he came to her room on Wood Street. Malcolm did not like Walter Dalton and referred to him as a fairy, which he was. Walter was also an alcoholic, and the college had let him go, and now he lived in a house on Coombs Island. Walter came into the bar every night that Angie played. Sometimes he brought her a gift—a silk scarf once, a pair of leather gloves with tiny buttons on the side. He always handed his car keys to Joe, and then after closing, Joe often drove him home, with one of the busboys driving Joe’s car to give Joe a drive back.
    â€œWhat a pathetic life,” Malcolm had said to Angie, about Walter. “Sitting there every night getting stewed.”
    Angie didn’t like to have people called pathetic, but she didn’t say anything. Sometimes, not often, Angie would think that people might call her life with Malcolm pathetic. This would occur to her as she walked down a sunny sidewalk, or it might happen when she woke in the night. It made her heart race, and she would go over in her mind the kinds of things he had said to her over the years. At first he had said, “I think about you all the time.” He still said, “I love you.” Sometimes, “What would I do without you, Angie?” He never bought her gifts and she wouldn’t have wanted him to.
    She heard the street door open and close, felt the brief chill from the outdoors once again. From the corner of her eye she caught the motion of a man in a dark coat sinking into a chair in the far corner, and there was something in the way he ducked, or moved, that ever so slightly jogged her mind. But she was shaky tonight.
    â€œDear,” she whispered to Betty, who was moving past with a tray of glasses. “Could you tell Joe I need a little Irish coffee?”
    â€œSure,” said Betty, a nice girl, small as a child. “No problem.”
    She drank it with one hand, still playing the notes of “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” and gave a wink to Joe, who nodded gravely. At the end of the night, she would have a drink with Joe and Walter, and she would