Free Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout Page B

little trunk sticking at an angle in the air.
    She began to play “We Shall Overcome,” but somebody from the bar called out, “Hey, a little serious there, Angie,” and so she smiled even more brightly and played ragtime instead. Stupid to play that—to play “We Shall Overcome.” Simon would think it was stupid, she realized that now. “You’re so schmaltzy,” he used to say.
    But he had said other things. When he took her to lunch with her mother that first time: “You’re like a person in a beautiful fairy tale,” he had said, sunlight falling across the table on the deck.
    â€œYou’re the perfect daughter,” he had said, out in the rowboat in the bay, her mother waving from the rocks. “You have the face of an angel,” he said the day they stepped from the boat onto Puckerbrush Island. Later he sent her one white rose.
    Oh, she had been just a girl. She had come into this very bar with her friends one night that summer, and there he was playing “Fly Me to the Moon.” It was like he’d had little lights flickering off him.
    A nervous fellow, though, Simon had been, his whole body jerking around like a puppet pulled by strings. A lot of force in his playing. But it lacked—well, deep in her heart she had known even then that his playing lacked—well,
feeling.
“Play ‘Feelings,’ ” people sometimes requested then, but he never did. Too corny, he said. Too schmaltzy.
    He had come up from Boston just for the summer but stayed two years. When he broke it off with Angie, he said, “It’s like I have to date both you and your mother. It gives me the creeps.” Later, he wrote to her. “You’re neurotic,” he wrote. “You’re wounded.”
    She couldn’t use the pedal; her leg was shaking beneath her black skirt. He was the only person she’d ever told that her mother had taken money from men.
    A burst of laughter came from the bar and Angie looked over, but it was just some of the fishermen telling stories with Joe. Walter Dalton smiled sweetly at her, rolled his eyes toward the fishermen.
    Her mother had knit the three of them matching blue sweaters for Christmas. When her mother left the room, Simon said, “We will never wear these at the same time.” Her mother bought him a whole stack of Beethoven records. When Simon left, her mother wrote and asked him for the records back, but he didn’t send them. Her mother said they could still wear the blue sweaters, and when her mother wore the blue sweater, she had Angie wear hers as well. Her mother said to her one day, “Simon got rejected from music school, you know. He’s a real estate lawyer in Boston. Bob Beane bumped into him down there.”
    â€œOkay,” Angie had said.
    She thought, then, she wouldn’t see him again. Because she had seen a shadow of envy flicker darkly over his face the day she’d told him (oh, she had told him everything, child that she was in that shack with her mother!) how once, when she was fifteen, a man from Chicago had heard her play at a local wedding. He ran a music school and had talked with her mother for two days. Angie should be at the school. There would be a scholarship, room and board. No, Angie’s mother had said. She’s Mommy’s girl. But for years Angie had pictured the place: a white, sprawling place where young people played the piano all day. She would be taught by kind men and women; she would learn to read music. All the rooms would be heated. There would be none of the sounds that came from her mother’s room, sounds that made her push her hands to her ears at night, sounds that made her leave the house and go to the church to play the piano. But no, Angie’s mother had decided. She was Mommy’s girl.
    She glanced again at Simon. He was leaning back in his chair watching her. There was no pocket of warmth, the way there was