Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout Read Free Book Online Page A

sighed, rearranged her feet, pushed the lever—much to Kevin’s surprise—to make herself more comfortable, moving the seat back. “I suspect they’ll get her fixed up one of these days, and then she’ll be pregnant with triplets.”
    Kevin took his hands from his pockets, cracked his knuckles. “Patty was nice,” he said. “I had forgotten about Patty.”
    â€œShe’s still nice. That’s what I said. What are you doing in New York?”
    â€œOh.” He raised a hand, saw the reddened marks that spotted them, crossed his arms. “I’m in training. I got my medical degree four years ago.”
    â€œSay, that’s impressive. What kind of doctor are you training to be?”
    He looked at the dashboard, couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed the filth of it. There in the sunlight it seemed to be telling her he was a slob, pathetic, not a shred of dignity. He took in a breath and said, “Psychiatry.”
    He expected her to say “Ahhh…” and when she said nothing, he glanced at her, and found that she was giving a simple matter-of-fact nod.
    â€œIt’s beautiful here,” he said, squinting back toward the bay. The remark held gratitude for what he felt was her discretion, and it was true, as well, for the bay—which he seemed to view from behind a large pane of glass, larger than the windshield—and which did have, he understood, a kind of splendor, the twanging, rocking sailboats, the whipped water, the wild rugosa. How much better to be a fisherman, to spend one’s day in the midst of this. He thought of the PET scans he had studied, always looking for his mother, hands in his pockets, nodding as the radiologists spoke, and sometimes tears twinkling behind his lids—the enlargement of the amygdala, the increase in the white-matter lesions, the severe depletion in the number of glial cells. The brains of the bipolar.
    â€œBut I’m not going to be a psychiatrist,” he said.
    The wind was really picking up now, making the ramp to the float bob up and down. “I imagine you get a lot of wicky-wackies in that business,” Mrs. Kitteridge said, adjusting her feet, making a scraping sound as she moved them across the grit of the car floor.
    â€œSome.”
    He had gone to medical school thinking he’d become a pediatrician, as his mother had been, but he had been drawn to psychiatry, in spite of his recognition that those who became psychiatrists did so as a result of their own messed-up childhoods, always looking, looking, looking for the answer in the writings of Freud, Horney, Reich, of why they were the anal, narcissistic, self-absorbed freaks that they were, and yet at the same time denying it, of course—what bullshit he had witnessed among his colleagues, his professors! His own interest had become narrowed to victims of torture, but that had also led him to despair, and when he had finally come under the care of Murray Goldstein, Ph.D., M.D., and had told the man his plans to work at the Hague with those whose feet had been beaten raw, whose bodies and minds lay in ruinous disorder, Dr. Goldstein had said, “What are you, crazy?”
    He’d been attracted to crazy. Clara—what a name—Clara Pilkington appeared to be the sanest person he’d ever met. And wasn’t that something? She ought to have been wearing a billboard around her neck: COMPLETELY CRAZY CLARA.
    â€œYou know the old saying, I’m sure,” Mrs. Kitteridge said. “Psychiatrists are nutty, cardiologists are hard-hearted—”
    He turned to look at her. “And pediatricians?”
    â€œTyrants,” Mrs. Kitteridge acknowledged. She gave one shrug to her shoulder.
    Kevin nodded. “Yeah,” he said softly.
    After a moment, Mrs. Kitteridge said, “Well, your mother may not have been able to help it.”
    He was surprised. His urge to suck on his knuckles was like an