“Well, they’re doing a damn good job,” Helen said, looking over his shoulder, scanning the tree line again, sure that someone (something) was out there, smiling a wicked little smile.
CHAPTER 4
Olive
MAY 19, 2015
Olive danced around the kitchen making breakfast. Daddy wasn’t downstairs yet, but he needed to be out the door in half an hour, so she was sure he’d be popping in at any minute, looking for coffee. And wouldn’t he be surprised when he saw the special breakfast she’d made?
A busy beaver,that’s what Mama used to say when she saw Olive working hard at something.Aren’t you a busy beaver.
Olive smiled. She was anindustriousgirl. That was a word from a vocabulary sheet a while ago, back when she did her homework regularly.
Industrious.
The old metal percolator was on the back of the stove, bubbling away. They used to have a Mr. Coffee coffeepot, but Mama liked the old-fashioned blue-and-white enameled percolator they used for camping better, so the electric one was put out at a yard sale. Mama loved yard sales—having them, stopping at them. Every spring, she cleaned the house, dragged a whole assortment of things out to the driveway, and set them up on rickety card tables: clothes, books, kitchen things, old toys, funny knickknacks. Stuff Olive was sure no one would want, but people always came and bought it. Then, over the summer,Mama would refill the house with treasures picked up from other people’s yard sales. Sometimes Olive was sure her mother was buying back things she’d sold at her own sale; just this weird cycle of things coming and going from their house. Olive had a boomerang her dad had given her for her birthday. She came to believe that some objects were like that boomerang—they went out, then found their way right back where they started from. Some things didn’t want to let go.
Using the percolator, hearing it bubble up like a living thing as it filled the kitchen with its warm coffee smell, reminded her of Mama.
Olive had taken to drinking coffee since Mama left; like her mother, she took it sweet with lots of milk. The first time she had it, she didn’t put enough milk and sugar in, and the bitterness made her insides pucker. She had a big cup and her heart raced like a rocket engine. But she learned to pour in plenty of milk, and soon, she found her body craving the jolt the early-morning coffee gave her. She’d taken to it just like she’d taken to a lot of things: cooking, making sure the dishes got done, making sure Daddy was up and out the door to make it to work on time each morning. And the renovations. The endless ripping down of drywall, moving of walls. The way she and Daddy would change something all around, only to put it back just the way it had been a month later.
A Sisyphean task—that’s what it was. She’d learned about that in school. English was the one class she was in with Mike, and he loved when they did the unit on Greek myths and knew all the stories already. She thought most of the stories were alarming and sad, especially the one about Sisyphus—that poor man rolling the boulder up the hill with a stick only to have it roll back down. That’s what the renovations were like.Futile—that was the word Ms. Jenkins, Olive’s freshman English teacher, used to describe it.
Olive poured some coffee into Mama’s favorite mug: an oversized red mug that was really more like a bowl and had a chip on one side.
“When you go to a café in France, this is what all the people drink from,” Mama said once.
“Have you been to France, Mama?” Olive asked.
“No,” she said. “But that’s the first thing we’ll do when we find that treasure—go off and see the world! Sit down and have a café au lait in a French café!”
Olive checked the oven—she was baking cinnamon buns from a can. She’d bought them herself at the general store. Her father didn’t go to the grocery store much these days. Riley used to bring sacks of groceries when she came over, but Daddy got mad and told her to quit doing that, that they weren’t a goddamn charity case. Olive would ask him for a little cash here and there so she could pick up what they needed at Ferguson’s General Store in town: coffee, milk, cereal, bread, canned soups. Nothing fancy. The cinnamon rolls, they were kind of an extravagance, but she was in a celebratory mood.
“Morning, Ollie,” Daddy said, coming into the kitchen. “You had the news on at all?”
“No,” she said.
He took in a breath, puffed out his cheeks as he let it go. “Terrible thing,” he said in a low voice. “A bus crash out on Route 4 last night. Full of seniors from the high school coming back from a trip to Boston. A bunch hurt, three killed. Might be kids you know.” He watched her, waiting to see how she’d respond.
Olive nodded. She didn’t really know any seniors. Sure, she passed them in the halls, and sometimes they seemed to know her (or her story at least, and would whisper or giggle to each other as they walked by).
“Did the bus hit another car?”
“No, it went off the road. They’re saying the driver swerved to avoid something in the road. An animal, maybe.”
Olive nodded, wasn’t sure what else to say.
Daddy looked around the kitchen, shuffled his feet.
“There’s coffee ready,” Olive said.
“Sure smells good in here.” He smiled.
“I’m making cinnamon rolls,” she said.
“Ya are, huh?” He reached for the pot of coffee on the stove, poured himself a cup. “What’s the occasion?”
“Just thought we deserved a treat,” she said.
