Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

these pamphlets, talking about the trips we’d take when he got well.” She rubs her face with both hands. “Gosh, Olive.” Marlene stops and looks at the knife Olive is holding. “Oh, gosh, Olive. I’m so embarrassed.” And it seems she really is; her cheeks are flushing a deep pink, now a deep red. “No need to be,” Olive tells her. “We all want to kill someone at some point.” Olive’s ready right now to say, if Marlene wants to hear, the different people she might like to kill. But Marlene says, “No, not that. Not that. That I sat there with him and we planned those trips.” She tears at the Kleenex, which is pretty well shredded. “Gosh, Olive, it was like we believed it. And there he was, losing weight, so weak—‘Marlene, bring over the basket of trips,’ he’d say, and I would. It makes me so embarrassed now, Olive.” An innocent, Olive thinks, gazing at this woman. A real one. You don’t find them anymore. Boy, you do not.

“John! I never knew such goodness in the world.”