Free Olive, Again: A Novel by Elizabeth Strout Page B

feeling—not her mother—frightened her. Her silence seemed to cause her mother’s wrath to increase—“I’m calling your sister!” her mother yelled—and when it was done, when her mother had left Kayley’s bedroom, Kayley looked around and thought the room seemed vandalized: A pair of her underpants had landed on a lamp that had been overturned on her small desk, socks were against the far wall, her pink quilt had been ripped.
    When Brenda came over she said, “Just leave us for a bit, Mom.” Sitting beside Kayley on her bed, Brenda said, “Oh, honey, what has happened?” Kayley looked at her; she wanted to cry now, yet she did not let herself. “Honey,” said Brenda, taking Kayley’s hand and stroking it, “honey, just tell me where you got the money, that’s all, honey. Just tell me.”
    “If you added it up, you’d see it was my house cleaning money. And also from the doughnut shop.”
    Brenda nodded. “Okay, I thought so. Mom just got really, really furious because you’d quit Bertha Babcock and not told her. Mom’s having a hard time, and she saw all this cash and thought maybe there were drugs involved or something.”
    “Oh, please, ” said Kayley, and Brenda nodded understandingly, stroking Kayley’s arm now, and said, “Oh, honey, I knew it wasn’t drugs.”
    After a few moments Kayley said, “I kind of hate living here with her. She hardly talks to me. And—and it hurts my feelings.”
    “Oh, honey,” said Brenda. “Now listen, honey. Mom’s gotten super depressed since Dad died. And she was really too old to have had you—” Brenda leaned in and said, “But thank God she did!” Kayley looked at her sister, the dark patches beneath her eyes; she suddenly remembered how Brenda had said, “He wants it all the time, and it’s kind of making me sick.”
    “Brenda, I love you,” Kayley said quietly.
    “And we all love you. Now listen to me, honey.” Brenda waited and said, as though it were a secret, “Honey, you’re smart. You know that, right? The rest of us are more like Mom,” and she put her finger to her lips as though to indicate this should be kept secret. “But you’re like Dad. You’re smart. So, Kayley, honey, just keep on doing well in school and you will have a future. A real future.”
    “What do you mean, a real future?”
    “I mean, you could be a doctor or nurse, or someone important, Kayley.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Seriously,” Brenda said.
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    The next day, after her mother left for work, Kayley took the many envelopes of cash from her closet, and as she walked around looking for a place to hide them, she suddenly thought of the piano. She opened the top of it, and slipped them in, and watched them fall down to the bottom behind the wires. She had no idea how she would ever get them out, but they were safe there; she had stopped playing the piano.
    She now expected nothing from her mother. And so when her mother was suddenly pleasant to her on certain evenings, Kayley was surprised and she was pleasant in return. She talked to her mother about Miss Minnie one night, and her mother listened. Her mother spoke of the different patients that came into the dental office where she worked, and Kayley listened. It was a doable existence.
    And this is why one Saturday when Kayley came back from the doughnut shop and stepped into the living room and saw—like a person’s front tooth missing—the absence where the piano had been, she felt gutted, almost as though it was not real.
    “I sold it,” her mother said. “You never play it anymore, so I sold it to a Grange Hall near Portland.”
    Kayley waited, but no phone call ever came about the money.
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    On one of the last days of summer, Mrs. Kitteridge came back into the doughnut shop. She was alone this time, and no one else was there at the moment. “Hello, child,” she said, and Kayley said, “Hello, Mrs. Kitteridge.”
    “You still working for that Ringrose bat?” Mrs. Kitteridge asked;