Finally, she turned and left, off to Seattle, to some life for herself. Olivia took the bread from the counter and pressed it against her nose. She smelled orange and cinnamon, the bitter scent of cranberries. The bread was still warm. Olivia breathed in its holiday smell; then she took it out back to the Dumpster and threw it away.
Sometimes, Olivia looked out her kitchen window at the Hudson River and New Jersey beyond and imagined taking a bus out there, to Morristown, where Amanda lived. It hadn’t worked out in Seattle, the girl had written her. Now she was back home, taking Prozac, working at a bookstore. Olivia could go out there and find Amanda’s house, knock on the door, wait until she saw the girl’s bland face. But then what? She always came back to that question: then what? After all, what could a teenaged girl possibly give her that she could not give herself? How in the world, Olivia wondered, could someone so young and troubled possibly help her?
chapter two
Nouns Are the Part of Speech That Hurts
OLIVIA JOGGED. IT was June. Hazy, hot, and humid. “The three h’s,” the vapid weatherman had said on the sunrise weather report. He had grinned as he pointed to a drawing of a sweating yellow sun. Olivia added weathermen to her list of things that annoyed her. The list was long and growing fast. Just that morning, after driving through the night alone to get up here finally and close up the beach house, put it on the market, do what everyone had been telling her to do since David died—“Get on with your life!”—after drinking so many bitter take-out coffees that she’d been unable to sleep and instead had smeared paste on the kitchen wall and flung everything she could find up there, when she finally fell asleep on the couch, the phone woke her.
“I hear you have a house for sale?” a young woman said.
Olivia had yawned into the phone, closed all the shades against the day, and said, “Who told you that?” in a tone that was less than nice. She didn’t care. Even from the now dark living room, Olivia could see the mess she’d made of the wall where she had once planned to stencil the William Carlos Williams poem about plums.
“Uh,” the woman said—stupidly, Olivia thought. “Your sister? Amy?”
“Figures,” Olivia mumbled. Her sister, Amy, four years younger, bitter, divorced, a single mother, had been trying to take charge of Olivia’s life since David died. Amy was, Olivia had decided, almost relieved that she and David’s sudden romance and marriage had ended so soon and so tragically. “It’s time,” Amy kept reminding Olivia, “to grow up.”
The woman took a big, impatient breath. “My name is Kim Potter-Franco and my husband is Joseph Franco,” she said, and when Olivia didn’t give her a how-do-you-do, she continued, “Anyway, my husband and I—we’re newlyweds, you know?—we’re renting over by the college, in the graduate-student apartments, and they’re just awful. So when I met your sister at the gym and she said you wanted to sell your house, or maybe even rent it first, I said, I just have to call. We’re both getting Ph.D.’s,” she added, her voice full of idealism and hope, “in literature.”
Olivia could see it, Amy and this idiot side by side on treadmills, walking hard and fast and going nowhere.
“This is our house,” Olivia said. “And it’s not for sale yet.”
“These apartments,” Kim Potter-Franco said, lowering her voice, “are not so great. We moved here from Ohio and we had this darling little place. We just want somewhere nice.”
“Our house isn’t nice,” Olivia said. One of the witches from the occult store next to the Rose Tattoo had given her a book on feng shui and some smudge sticks to chase out the bad spirits and bad karma here. “Bad spirits,” Olivia added.
“It’s just that a house would be so nice,” the woman said, “what with all our new things—the wedding china and crystal. We’re newlyweds,” she said again.
“We don’t want anyone in our house!” Olivia shouted. “It’s ours. We bought it so we could put our toes in the ocean whenever we wanted. We bought it so that we could grow old here. We don’t want anyone with a stupid hyphenated name living here with china and crystal and big dreams. Do you hear me, you stupid fucking newlywed? You happy person?”
But Kim Potter-Franco had hung up already.
Olivia jogged down the scenic route, careful to run on the side facing traffic, to stay close to the edge of the road. She jogged past blue hydrangeas and old stone walls and houses hidden behind large trees—weeping willows, evergreen, oak, and maple. She jogged until she reached the spot. Then she stopped, panting, and waited.