CHAPTER 28
Olive
AUGUST 23, 2015
“Dad,” Olive said through the dust mask she was wearing. They were tearing down the old plaster and lath wall in her bedroom, and the air was thick with dust. It was funny, because she’d spent all day yesterday helping Helen and Nate finish putting up new drywall in their house. Today they were starting the process of taping and compounding. And here she was, tearing down an old, perfectly good wall. It was the one they’d thought they were keeping, but Daddy insisted they redo it anyway—that it would look funny to have smooth, new drywall on three walls and bumpy old plaster on the other. She’d told him it was fine, preferable even, to keep the old wall (she even suggested accentuating the difference by painting it a different color), but he insisted. “Your mama always says ‘No point doing a job if you’re not going to do it right.’ ”
And who was she to argue with Mama?
Olive was determined to work quickly, to hurry up and get her room taken apart so they could put it back together. It was taking forever. They’d had to put her room on hold while they tore out the bathroom wall and redid the plumbing, which had begun to leak. Then her dad decided they really needed to paint the living room, and they’d gotten two coats done before he announced that the color was all wrong and Mama wouldn’t like it at all, so they’d tried a paler shade of blue, which he said wasn’t right, either. Olive put her foot down, insisting that they had to leave the living room and go back to working on her bedroom. If her dad wouldn’t help, and just abandoned the work like he had with so many other rooms before they were done, she’d finish it herself. She’d been camping out on the lumpy living room couch since before school ended and needed the sanctuary of her own room back. She could live inside a house that was a construction zone if she just had one finished place to take refuge in, one room where everything was in its place. An eye in the center of the storm.
“What’s up, Ollie?”
“I’ve been thinking. You know, about—” She hesitated, not sure she could go on. Knowing this was the one subject she wasn’t supposed to bring up, the thing that hurt her father the most. But she had to. She needed to know. “About Mom. About how things were just before she left.”
He clenched his jaw. He did not wear a mask when he worked, so she could see the muscles working under his taut, unshaven skin that was now coated with a thin layer of plaster dust. He looked like a ghost.
“Yeah?” he said, holding the sledgehammer, ready to swing again, but waiting now.
“I remember how she was gone a lot. Did she ever tell you where she was going, who she was spending time with?”
“No, Ollie, she didn’t. And when she did tell me, it was real vague. ‘Out with Riley’ or ‘friends,’ that sort of thing.” He paused. “Part of me knew she was lying. But I didn’t want to face the truth.”
“What truth is that, Dad?”
He scowled, shook his head. He wasn’t going to say it out loud.
“But what if that wasn’t the truth? What if that was all just rumors?”
“Drop it,” he said.
“But, Dad, what if that’s not what happened? What if she—”
“She would go out with one set of clothes on and come back in another!” Daddy’s eyes blazed. “She’d tell me she was with Riley when I knew damn well she hadn’t been because Riley called the house looking for her, wondering if she wanted to go out. There were nights she didn’t even bother to come home at all, Ollie. I’d catch her sneaking in at dawn. How else do you explain it?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Ollie. I’m really sorry, but it’s the truth.”
“I talked to Sylvia—you know, Mom’s friend who tends bar over at Rosy’s—and I know Mama spent at least one night over at her place.”
He turned back to the wall, ripped off a chunk of loose plaster with his hand. “Is that right?”
“Sylvia also said something about a club Mama might have been a part of. Do you know anything about that?”
She considered mentioning Dicky Barns but decided that was a lousy idea—she already knew what her daddy thought of Dicky, and she thought that might just send him off on a rant and that wasn’t the way she wanted this to go.
“She was probably talking about a dance club or something,” he said, sounding kind of disgusted. “Loud music, cheap well drinks. Your mama loves places like that.” There went his jaw again, tightening, like he was clamping something between his teeth, holding it tight.
Olive remembered how sometimes Mama and Daddy would go out for a date night: dinner at the steak place in Barre, sometimes a movie after. Sometimes they’d go out to Rosy’s to watch a Red Sox game on the big screen or meet up with some of Daddy’s friends from the town team after a softball game. Daddy used to play on the team but didn’t anymore because of his bad knee. But she couldn’t think of a single time they ever went out dancing or to a place that called itself a club. Those trips were reserved for Mama and Riley’s nights out. Or Mama on her own, meeting up with other friends. Other boyfriends maybe even, if you believed the rumors.
Olive shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what Sylvia meant.”
“Well, your mama never said anything to me about any club. She’s not exactly a joiner kind of person, know what I mean?” He turned back to her, looked her in the eye.
Olive nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. Her mom had never volunteered to help on field trips or to make brownies for the school bake sale. When Olive had begged to join the Girl Scouts in third grade because her best friend, Jenna, was in it, her mom had said no. “What do you want to go and do that for, Ollie? Sitting around making macaroni necklaces and selling cookies with a bunch of girls in identical uniforms, competing for badges. Groups like that, they’re just training kids to lose their individuality, to be like everyone else. That’s not what you want, is it?”
Olive had shaken her head then. But it was a lie. Secretly, part of her did want to be like those other girls, to blend in, to feel like she belonged.
Mama was her own person. Her own unique individual who spun and glittered and shone when she walked into any room. But Olive just wanted to blend in, to disappear in the scenery.
“Do you have any idea how special you are, Ollie?” Mama had asked her one night, not long before she went away.
