Olive Kitteridge Read Online Free

bewilderment on her young face; and yet he can still remember how he could make her smile. Now, so far away in Texas—so far away it’s a different country—she is the age he was then. She had dropped a red mitten one night; he had bent to get it, held the cuff open and watched while she’d slipped her small hand in.
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    The white church sits near the bare maple trees. He knows why he is thinking of Denise with this keenness. Her birthday card to him did not arrive last week, as it has, always on time, for the last twenty years. She writes him a note with the card. Sometimes a line or two stands out, as in the one last year when she mentioned that Paul, a freshman in high school, had become obese. Her word. “Paul has developed a full-blown problem now—at three hundred pounds, he is obese.” She does not mention what she or her husband will do about this, if in fact they can “do” anything. The twin girls, younger, are both athletic and starting to get phone calls from boys “which horrifies me,” Denise wrote. She never signs the card “love,” just her name in her small neat hand, “Denise.”
    In the gravel lot by the church, Daisy Foster has just stepped from her car, and her mouth opens in a mock look of surprise and pleasure, but the pleasure is real, he knows—Daisy is always glad to see him. Daisy’s husband died two years ago, a retired policeman who smoked himself to death, twenty-five years older than Daisy; she remains ever lovely, ever gracious with her kind blue eyes. What will become of her, Henry doesn’t know. It seems to Henry, as he takes his seat in his usual middle pew, that women are far braver than men. The possibility of Olive’s dying and leaving him alone gives him glimpses of horror he can’t abide.
    And then his mind moves back to the pharmacy that is no longer there.
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    â€œHenry’s going hunting this weekend,” Denise said one morning in November. “Do you hunt, Henry?” She was getting the cash drawer ready and didn’t look up at him.
    â€œUsed to,” Henry answered. “Too old for it now.” The one time in his youth when he had shot a doe, he’d been sickened by the way the sweet, startled animal’s head had swayed back and forth before its thin legs had folded and it had fallen to the forest floor. “Oh, you’re a softie,” Olive had said.
    â€œHenry goes with Tony Kuzio.” Denise slipped the cash drawer into the register, and stepped around to arrange the breath mints and gum that were neatly laid out by the front counter. “His best friend since he was five.”
    â€œAnd what does Tony do now?”
    â€œTony’s married with two little kids. He works for Midcoast Power, and fights with his wife.” Denise looked over at Henry. “Don’t say that I said so.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œShe’s tense a lot, and yells. Boy, I wouldn’t want to live like that.”
    â€œNo, it’d be no way to live.”
    The telephone rang and Denise, turning on her toe playfully, went to answer it. “The Village Pharmacy. Good morning. How may I help you?” A pause. “Oh, yes, we have multivitamins with no iron…. You’re very welcome.”
    On lunch break, Denise told the hefty, baby-faced Jerry, “My husband talked about Tony the whole time we were going out. The scrapes they’d get into when they were kids. Once, they went off and didn’t get back till way after dark, and Tony’s mother said to him, ‘I was so worried, Tony. I could kill you.’ ” Denise picked lint off the sleeve of her gray sweater. “I always thought that was funny. Worrying that your child might be dead and then saying you’ll kill him.”
    â€œYou wait,” Henry Kitteridge said, stepping around the boxes Jerry had brought into