Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman Read Free Book Online Page B

through. Someone who noticed that Britt-Marie had taken special care with her hair. Or at least pretended to notice. Or at least let Britt-Marie go on pretending.
    Someone who came home to a newly mopped floor and a hot dinner on the table and, on the odd occasion, noticed that she had made an effort. It may be that a heart only finally breaks after leaving a hospital room in which a shirt smells of pizza and perfume, but it will break more readily if it has burst a few times before.

    Britt-Marie turns on the light at six o’clock the following morning. Not because she’s really missing the light, but because people may have noticed the light was on last night, and if they’ve realized Britt-Marie has spent the night at the recreation center she doesn’t want them thinking she’s still asleep at this time of the morning.
    There’s an old television by the sofas, which she could turn on to feel less lonely, but she avoids it because there will most likely be soccer on it. There’s always soccer nowadays, and faced with that option Britt-Marie would actually prefer to be lonely. The recreation center encloses her in a guarded silence. The coffee percolator lieson its side and no longer blinks at her. She sits on the stool in front of it, remembering how Kent’s children said Britt-Marie was “passive-aggressive.” Kent laughed in the way that he did after drinking vodka and orange in front of a soccer match, his stomach bouncing up and down and the laughter gushing forth in little snorting bursts through his nostrils, and then he replied: “She ain’t bloody passive-aggressive, she’s aggressive-passive!” And then he laughed until he spilled vodka on the shagpile rug.
    That was the night Britt-Marie decided she had had enough and moved the rug to the guest room without a word. Not because she’s passive-aggressive, obviously. But because there are limits.
    She wasn’t upset about what Kent had said, because most likely he didn’t even understand it himself. On the other hand she was offended that he hadn’t even checked to see if she was standing close enough to hear.
    She looks at the coffee percolator. For a fleeting, carefree moment the thought occurs to her that she might try to mend it, but she comes to her senses and moves away from it. She hasn’t mended anything since she was married. It was always best to wait until Kent came home, she felt. Kent always said, “women can’t even put together IKEA furniture,” when they watched women in television programs about house building or renovation. “Quota-filling,” he used to call it. Britt-Marie liked sitting next to him on the sofa solving the crossword. Always so close to the remote control that she could feel the tips of his fingers against her knee when he fumbled with it to flip the channel to a soccer match.
    Then she fetches more baking soda and cleans the entire recreation center one more time. She has just sprinkled another batch of baking soda over the sofas when there’s a knock at the door. It takes Britt-Marie a fair amount of time to open it, because runninginto the bathroom and doing her hair in front of the mirror without functioning lights is a somewhat complicated process.
    Somebody is sitting outside the door with a box of wine in her hands.
    “Ha,” says Britt-Marie to the box.
    “Good wine, you know. Cheap. Fell off the back of a truck, huh!” says Somebody quite smugly.
    Britt-Marie doesn’t know what that means.
    “But, you know, I have to pour into bottle with label and all that crap, in case tax authority asks about it,” says Somebody. “It’s called ‘house red’ in my pizzeria, if tax authority asking, okay?” Somebody partly gives Britt-Marie the box and partly throws it at her before she forces her way inside, the wheelchair slamming across the threshold, to have a look around.
    Britt-Marie looks at the goo of melted snow and gravel left behind by the wheels with only marginally less horror than if it had