Extract 7

Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout
The year that followed—was it the happiest year of his own life? He often thought so, even knowing
that such a thing was foolish to claim about any year of one’s life; but in his memory, that particular year
held the sweetness of a time that contained no thoughts of a beginning and no thoughts of an end, and when
he drove to the pharmacy in the early morning darkness of winter, then later in the breaking light of spring,
the full-throated summer opening before him, it was the small pleasures of his work that seemed in their
simplicities to fill him to the brim. When Henry Thibodeau drove into the gravelly lot, Henry Kitteridge often
went to hold the door open for Denise, calling out, “Hello there, Henry,” and Henry Thibodeau would stick
his head through the open car window and call back, “Hello there, Henry,” with a big grin on a face lit with
decency and humor. Sometimes there was just a salute. “Henry!” And the other Henry would return,
“Henry!” They got a kick out of this, and Denise, like a football tossed gently between them, would duck into
the store.
When she took off her mittens, her hands were as thin as a child’s, yet when she touched the buttons on
the cash register, or slid something into a white bag, they assumed the various shapes of a graceful grown
woman’s hands, hands—thought Henry—that would touch her husband lovingly, that would, with the quiet
authority of a woman, someday pin a baby’s diaper, smooth a fevered forehead, tuck a gift from the tooth
fairy under a pillow.
Watching her, as she poked her glasses back up onto her nose while reading over the list of inventory,
Henry thought she was the stuff of America, for this was back when the hippie business was beginning, and
reading in Newsweek about the marijuana and “free love” could cause an unease in Henry that one look at
Denise dispelled.

Extract 8
Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout
Patty Howe poured coffee into two white mugs, placed them on the counter, said quietly, “You’re
welcome,” and moved back to arrange the corn muffins that had just been passed through the opening from
the kitchen. She had seen the man sitting in the car—he’d been there well over an hour—but people did that
sometimes, drove out from town just to gaze at the water. Still, there was something about him that was
troubling her. “They’re perfect,” she said to the cook, because the tops of the muffins were crispy at the
edges, yellow as rising suns. The fact that their newly baked scent did not touch off a queasiness in her, as
they had two times in the past year, made her sad; a soft dismalness settled over her. The doctor had said to
them, For three months you are not to even think of it.
The screen door opened, banged shut. Through the large window, Patty saw that the man in the car still
sat looking at the water, and as Patty poured coffee for an elderly couple that had seated themselves slowly
into a booth, as she asked how they were this nice morning, she suddenly knew who the man was, and
something passed over her, like a shadow crossing in front of the sun. “There you go,” she said to the couple,
and didn’t glance out the window again.
“Say, why doesn’t Kevin come over here instead,” Patty’s mother had suggested, when Patty had been
so small her head had only reached the kitchen counter, shaking it No, no, no, she didn’t want to go there.
She’d been scared of him; in kindergarten he had sucked on his wrist so hard it was always a brilliant disk of
a bruise, and his mother—tall, dark-haired, deep-voiced—had scared her, too. Now, as Patty put the corn
muffins onto a plate, she thought that her mother’s response had been graceful, brilliant almost.
Extract 9

Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout
When he got his medical degree from Chicago, attending the ceremony only because of one of his
teachers—a kind woman, who had said it would sadden her to have him not there—he sat beneath the full
sun, listening to the president of the university say, in his final words to them, “To love and be loved is the
most important thing in life,” causing Kevin to feel an inward fear that grew and spread through him, as
though his very soul were tightening. But what a thing to say—the man in his venerable robe, white hair,
grandfatherly face—he must’ve had no idea those words could cause such an exacerbation of the silent dread
in Kevin. Even Freud had said, “We must love or we grow ill.” They were spelling it out for him. Every
billboard, movie, magazine cover, television ad—it all spelled it out for him: We belong to the world of
family and love. And you don’t.
New York, the most recent, had held the largest hopes. The subways filled with such a variety of dull
colors and edgy-looking people; it relaxed him, the different clothes, the shopping bags, people sleeping or
reading or nodding their heads to some earphoned tune; he had loved the subways, and for a while the
activities of the hospitals. But his affair with Clara, and the end of it, had caused him to recoil from the place,
so that the streets now seemed crowded and tiresome—all the same. Dr. Goldstein he loved, but that was it—
everyone else had become tiresome, and he had thought more and more how provincial New Yorkers were,
and how they didn’t know it.
What he began to want was to see his childhood house—a house he believed, that he had never once
been happy in. And yet, oddly, the fact of its unhappiness seemed to have a hold on him with the sweetness
of a remembered love affair.

Extract 10

Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout
Kevin turned, so that as he slid down the high sheet of rock, his arms were spread as though to hug it,
but there was nothing to hug, just the flat scraping against his chest, ripping his clothes, his skin, his cheek,
and then the cold water rose over him. It stunned him, how cold the water was, as though he’d been dropped
into a huge test tube containing a pernicious chemical eating at his skin. His foot hit something steady in the
massive swooshing of the water; he turned and saw her reaching for him, her eyes open, her skirt swirled
around her waist; her fingers reached for him, missed, reached for him again, and he got hold of her. The
water receded for a moment, and as a wave came back to cover them, he pulled her hard, and her grip on him
was so tight he would not have thought it possible with her thin arms that she could hold anything as tightly
as she held him.
Again the water rose, they both took a breath; again they were submerged and his leg hooked over
something, an old pipe, unmoving. The next time, they both reached their heads high as the water rushed
back, another breath taken. He heard Mrs. Kitteridge yelling from above. He couldn’t hear the words, but he
understood that help was coming. He had only to keep Patty from falling away, and as they went again
beneath the swirling, sucking water, he strengthened his grip on her arm to let her know: He would not let her
go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing through each
wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their
safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the
power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she
wanted to hold on.
Extract 11

Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout
Angie was wearing a black skirt and a pink nylon top that parted at her collarbone, and there was something
about the tiny string of pearls she wore, and the pink top, and the bright red of her hair that seemed to glow
along with the Christmas tree, as if she were some extension of its festivities. She had arrived, as she always
did, at precisely six o’clock, smiling her vague, childlike smile, chewing on mints, saying hello to the
bartender, Joe, and to Betty, the waitress, then tucking her handbag and coat near the end of the bar. Joe, a
thickset man who had tended that bar for many years and had the watchful eye of any good bartender, had
come to the private conclusion that Angie O’Meara was really very frightened when she showed up at work
each night. This would account for the whiff of booze on her minty breath if you happened to be close
enough to smell it, and it accounted for the fact that she never took her twenty-minute break—although she
was allowed to by the music union, and encouraged to by the Warehouse owner. “I hate to get started again,”
she said to Joe one night, and that’s when he put it together, that Angie must have suffered from stage fright.
Joe was right when he imagined that Angie suffered from stage fright. What frightened her the most was the
moment of those first notes, because that was when people really listened: She was changing the atmosphere
in the room. It was the responsibility of this that frightened her. And it was why she played straight through
for three hours, without taking a break, in order to avoid the quiet that would fall over the room, to avoid
again the way people smiled at her when she sat down to play; no, she didn’t like the attention at all. What
she liked was playing the piano.

Extract 12

Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout
Angie had never taken piano lessons, although people tended not to believe this. So she had stopped
telling people this long ago. When she was four years old, she sat down at the piano in the church and began
to play, and it didn’t surprise her then, or now. “My hands are hungry,” she would say to her mother when
she was young, and it was like that—a hunger. The church had given her mother a key, and these days Angie
could still go there anytime and play the piano.
Behind her she heard the door open, felt the momentary chill, saw the tinsel on the tree sway, and
heard the loud voice of Olive Kitteridge say, “Too damn bad. I like the cold.”
The Kitteridges, when they came alone to the Warehouse, tended to come early and did not sit in the
lounge first but went straight through to the dining room. Still, Henry would always call out, “Evening there,
Angie,” smiling broadly on his way through, and Olive would wave her hand over her head in a kind of hello.
Henry’s favorite song was “Good Night, Irene,” and Angie would try to remember to play this later as the
Kitteridges walked back through on their way out. Lots of people had favorite songs, and Angie would
sometimes play them, but not always. Henry Kitteridge was different. She always played his song because
whenever she saw him, it was like moving into a warm pocket of air.
Tonight Angie was shaky. Tonight, as sometimes happened now, she felt a little queer in the head—
off-kilter. She made sure to keep a smile on her face and didn’t look at anyone except Walter Dalton, who sat
at the end of the bar. He blew her a kiss. She winked, a tiny gesture; you would have thought it was a blink
except she did it with only one eye.