“Do you have some kind of a track record with this?”
“I do, actually. I’ve set up four of these shops in Lower Manhattan, two in Brooklyn, and five more in Connecticut. Right now we’re looking for small towns in New York State that don’t have a lot of competitors. Once it’s set up, the business kind of runs itself. It’s really all about the initial capital and a good location, and when the investors are from the community, we tend to have a better outcome. It gives us more eyes and ears on the street. Speaking of which, I’m looking for a spot on Main Street, if you know of any. Vivian said you might be able to help me with that.”
“You shouldn’t have a problem, with all the empty storefronts,” Holly told him. “I can give you the name of a real estate agent. She should be able to track down the landlords.”
“Perfect,” he said, taking a pen out of his messenger bag. “So I have Vivian down for a hundred and twenty thousand. Is she still comfortable with that?”
“That’s her commitment,” Holly said, wondering even as she said it how Vivian could have that much money to spare for an uncertain investment.
“Excellent,” he said, clicking the pen a few times. “What about you? I could squeeze in another investor if you’re interested.”
Holly looked down at her menu and suppressed an urge to write Racine a check that would bounce higher than the Empire State Building. She wanted, for some reason, to make him think that money meant nothing to her.
“I don’t think that’s in the cards,” she said, feeling her cheeks grow slightly warm.
A waitress Holly had known for years approached the table. “Hi, folks, can I start you with some coffee?”
“Thanks, Helen,” Holly said, nodding.
“Nothing for me,” Racine said, standing up from the booth. “Unfortunately, I need to get back to the city. Here’s my card. I’ll call you when I have the papers ready for Vivian.”
Holly took the card—noting that he hadn’t tried very hard to talk her into investing. He ran a hand over his hair again, which Holly noticed was just on the verge of receding, and slung the messenger bag back over one shoulder as he left the restaurant. Through the plate-glass window, Holly could see him getting into a small white sports car.
“That’s a Jag,” Helen said, sitting down with the coffee pot where Racine had been just moments before. “He’s driving a Jag.”
“He must be doing okay then,” Holly said, now convinced that Vivian knew what she was doing and grateful for a small second paycheck that might allow her to reduce her reliance on her mother, who had been helping her with her mortgage for the last year. A little breathing room was all she wanted. After Helen filled her coffee cup, Holly sat up a little straighter, pushed her hair behind her ears, and opened the white binder. It wasn’t about driving a Jag for her. It was about fixing the garage door, which had been stuck halfway down for more than a year. It was about finally paying for the long-overdue service on the ancient furnace. But mostly it was about Marshall and Connor, who deserved to stay in their own home, the only one they had ever known.
She flipped through the binder. Maybe this was just a start.
CHAPTER 4
A week after her meeting with Racine, Holly found herself with her brother and sister in a funeral home. They had been charged with choosing a casket after their great-aunt Muriel died.
“I seem to recall that Aunt Muriel had a walnut dining-room set,” Holly’s brother, Henderson, said as he flipped through the casket catalogue in the funeral director’s overstuffed office, which smelled of stale tea bags. “Her living-room furniture was walnut too, wasn’t it?”
“Walnut is the Hyundai of coffins,” Holly told him, taking the catalogue and opening it across her knees on the couch where she sat with Henderson. “We could at least spring for cherry.”
“I have a friend who has a Hyundai,” said Holly’s sister, Desdemona, who could have chosen a chair but instead sat on a low circular ottoman covered in some kind of pink flowery fabric. “He says it’s a great value.”
Henderson sighed and looked out the window, as though he couldn’t be bothered to follow the conversation.
“How about an unfinished pine box?” Desdemona said in a low voice almost drowned out by the funeral home’s air-conditioning unit. “What kind of car would that be?”
“That’s a beater with two hundred thousand miles on it,” Holly said, smiling at her own comment.
Holly expected Henderson to make a snide remark about Hyundais or unfinished pine boxes, but instead he loosened his tie and unfastened the top button of his pressed white shirt. Holly noticed a few broken blood vessels dotting Henderson’s eyelids. His forehead was still relatively smooth, but the masculine thrust of his chin was losing a battle to the slack skin on his neck, which clearly wanted to spread its insolence, like a sullen teenager. She found herself uncharacteristically worried about him but then remembered how often he faked illness as a child. He was forever climbing on their mother’s lap, feigning a fever after pressing his forehead against the radiator in the bathroom.
“Let’s just pick one and get out of here,” Henderson said. “I’m suffocating with all this ancient upholstery. The dust mites are everywhere. I swear I can feel them crawling on me.”
The funeral director—stocky, balding, solicitous in the manner of a waiter—came back into the room. “Are we ready? I can give you a few more minutes if you need it.”
Henderson took the catalogue back from Holly, flipped a few pages, and pointed to a cherry casket with ivory silk lining. He had chosen it just as he would a bottle of wine: not the most expensive, but in the upper tier.
“That one,” he said.
“Very good, sir,” the funeral director said. “Excellent choice. I think you’ll be pleased.”
When the papers were signed, the three of them stood on the funeral home’s wide porch, which looked out over a stand of birch trees that seemed, to Holly, to symbolize aging—the bark so fragile, layers shedding from year to year exposing the imperfections in the once-sturdy trunks. The small, blue-collar city of Newburgh, New York, was where their mother had grown up and where Muriel, sister of their maternal grandfather, had lived her whole life. Muriel had never married, but as far as any of them knew, she had been content inside her small circle of cat-loving, sweater-making, churchgoing friends.
“I’m worried about Mom,” Desdemona said, twisting her gauzy scarf into a knot. “She must be feeling even worse than she says to skip being here for Aunt Muriel.”
“We’ve reached that stage,” Holly said, succumbing to the mood of resignation that permeates funeral homes. “We’re standing at the precipice as the previous generation crumbles away.”
“Uh-huh, the edge of oblivion,” Henderson added casually, looking at his watch as if it might tell him the date and time of his own death.
“Dad couldn’t stand Aunt Muriel,” Holly said. “He did nothing but complain when she came to visit. Don’t you remember? He said she smelled like a wet sheep.”
“All that knitting,” Henderson said. “Incidentally, we’ll have to get the money from Mom to pay for the casket, because I am essentially broke.” He delivered the last part with a tone of accomplishment, as if he had defied the odds and managed to pull off a feat no one had expected of him.
“You don’t know what broke is,” Holly said, rolling her eyes. “You drive an Audi. You wear expensive suits, and you go abroad twice a year. You’re the one who pays for things when Desdemona and I can’t afford them. In fact, I thought you were paying for the casket.”
“You think there’s some law of economics that prevents me from going broke just because the two of you are poor? I’m telling you the facts. My business went under. Nobody wants a financial adviser when they have no finances left to advise.” He ran a hand over his face and avoided their eyes. “I’m filing for Chapter 11.”
Holly stared at Henderson as if she could see into his brain if she tried hard enough. A chill ra
n down her back.
Then Desdemona voiced what Holly was thinking: “Are you really broke? As broke as the two of us?”
“Holly’s not broke, she’s just in a low-income bracket,” Henderson said to Desdemona, kicking a small rock off the porch into the rhododendrons. “And dancers never make any money. There’s a difference.”
Desdemona pulled a hand through her long dark hair, which she usually wore in a ponytail or bun. Having it out of its restraints seemed to make her nervous.
“We can’t afford the casket you picked out if we have to split the cost,” Holly said. “Or we’ll at least have to make sure it’s okay with Mom.”
“Maybe we should go back in and pick a cheaper one,” Desdemona said. “Aunt Muriel would understand.”
Henderson shook his head. “I need to find the restroom,” he said, and his sisters followed him back inside into a large oak-paneled viewing room, where he clutched his chest and let out a plaintive “Ow,” which gave Holly a startling twinge inside her own chest. Then she remembered it was Henderson. In response to the noise, the funeral home’s cadre of dark-suited men seemed to materialize from the paneling and practically wrestled Henderson to the shiny wood floor.
“Stretch him out,” one of them said. “You need a hard, flat surface for CPR.”
Henderson tried to sit up once, then swooned back. Two of the men eased his shoulders down to the floor as the third called 911, speaking with urgency.
“I just need some air,” Henderson said weakly, as if everyone else in the room were taking more than his or her fair share. It was the kind of stunt he had pulled when they were kids, Holly thought, and their mother wanted him to clean up his room.
“We’ll take him outside,” Holly said, wanting to suppress the panic rising in the room around her. She didn’t want a repeat of her episode with Vivian, which had left her depleted for days. “I’m sure he’ll be fine in a few minutes.”
“We can’t take a chance with chest pains,” one of the funeral employees said. “It’s best to be conservative.”
While they waited for the ambulance, the men in suits hovered around Henderson, checking and rechecking his pulse so compulsively that Holly began to wonder if they expected him to die, accustomed as they were to corpses.
After the cavalry came and took Henderson away in the ambulance, Desdemona and Holly followed them to the hospital in Holly’s car.
“I’m sure he’s okay,” Desdemona said as Holly pulled out of the funeral-home parking lot. “This is just one of his stunts, right?”
“Of course it is,” Holly said, though she suddenly felt a dull ache in her left arm. “He’s pulled this a million times. Remember? Every time Mom asked him to take out the garbage he’d suddenly develop a migraine or abdominal pains. He did the same thing to Wendy, which is probably why she divorced him.”
As Holly searched for a place to park at the hospital, that nagging 1 percent of doubt began to creep in, and she started to wonder if Henderson might really be sick. But by the time Holly and Desdemona were allowed to see Henderson in his curtained emergency room bay, the doctors had determined that his chest pains were caused by indigestion. They gave him some Prilosec and told him to go home.
Desdemona sat in the back as Holly drove them to the funeral home so Henderson could pick up his Audi. When Holly turned off the motor, they all listened to the ping and hiss of her old Subaru giving voice to its chronic exhaustion. All three got out of the Subaru and walked toward Henderson’s Audi, then Desdemona and Holly watched Henderson fold his six-foot-one frame into the tidy leathered nook of the driver’s seat. For some reason they all looked back toward the funeral home, which had the ivied air of a business that prints money, death being such a dependable commodity. Holly thought about the wood floor—Henderson’s CPR staging area—its gleaming planks hammered down with grief and polyeurethaned with the tears of countless grieving relatives.
Holly gave Henderson a long hug, half out of smugness that she had been right about his exaggerated pains and half out of true sympathy for his financial plight. She knew his sense of self-worth was tied to his bank balance. Poor Hen, she thought.
When Henderson drove off, heading to an expensive apartment in Boston he doubtless could no longer afford, Desdemona and Holly walked back to the Subaru so that Holly could drive to the station, where Desdemona would catch a train back to the city. Desdemona stepped toward the car with a dancer’s unconscious extension of limbs, her toe skimming the ground before the rest of her followed.
“I’m used to scraping by,” Desdemona said over the top of the car as Holly walked around to the driver’s side. “But I never worried about it when Henderson and Mom were there for backup. Not that I would ask, but . . .”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
Once inside, they both stared straight ahead through the windshield, and the car—mobile confessional that it was—allowed Holly to tell Desdemona something she’d been keeping from her.
“Mom has been helping me and the boys lately so we could keep up the house payments,” Holly said. “But I always assumed I could go to Henderson for help if I got desperate. He was my cushion.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Desperate.”
“More like predesperate.”
“Didn’t Chris have life insurance?”
“Who expects to drop dead at his age? He had a little insurance through work, but I ran through that years ago. I just never thought I’d come this far down the ladder, you know?”
Desdemona nodded as they left for the train station. “I do know,” she said quietly.
“But I have a second job now, so maybe I’ll finally be able to save a little,” Holly said. “I know I can’t ask Mom to help me forever.”
Desdemona didn’t seem to hear her. She continued to look out the window as the broad, slate-colored Hudson River came into view.
“When Dad died, I thought we’d have a reprieve from funerals,” Holly said as they drove through the city’s crumbling downtown, absorbing its sadness. “I thought Mom would be next, but ten or twenty years down the road. Instead, it was Chris and then Aunt Muriel, who I thought would be knitting cat clothes until she was a hundred and ten. People shouldn’t die in the wrong order. It’s so much harder.”
When she got home, Holly took out her cell phone and dialed her mother’s number. She was exhausted from the driving, the casket shopping, the news about Henderson’s bankruptcy, the trip to the ER, all of it, but she couldn’t go to sleep without hearing her mother’s reassurance that it would all be okay.
“Hi, Mom, it’s Holly,” she said. “Just checking on you. Feeling any better?”
“Hi, sweetie. Yes, I’m just fine,” Celia said. “Still a little tired, but I’m sure I’ll shake it soon.”
Holly thought she detected a note of false bravado in her mother’s voice, but she attributed it to a bad connection.
“So did you hear all this about Henderson? About his business?”
“Oh goodness. He told you? I heard yesterday, but I thought maybe he’d keep it to himself until after Aunt Muriel’s funeral.”
“Well, he did keep it to himself until after we picked out a fairly expensive casket.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. Muriel didn’t have anyone but me.”
Holly felt a knot in her neck loosen just a bit. Her mother had a way of taking a heavy burden without complaint. She was the family’s financial and emotional Sherpa.
“And speaking of not worrying,” Celia went on, “I’m going to send you this month’s check. I’ll put it in the mail tomorrow when I pay my bills.”
Holly nodded, as though her mother could see her. “Thank you, Mom,” she said. “I know I say this all the time, but you’re my savior. I know it’s just a house, but it’s our security. It’s all we have.”
“Say no more, Holly. It’s really nothing . . . but I think I should go now. I
can’t seem to keep my head up.”
“Okay then. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Holly hung up and went to bed, but she didn’t fall asleep for hours. She kept parsing the conversation, trying to sort out whether her mother had sounded all right or not quite herself.
When the call came the next day, Holly knew. The phone number on her cell was that of her mother’s next-door neighbor, who wouldn’t be calling her for anything other than an emergency. All her worst fears were confirmed. Her mother had suffered a stroke the night before, probably around the same time Holly had tossed and turned in bed worrying about her.
Holly sat completely still on the hard wooden pew for Aunt Muriel’s funeral, internally reassessing everything she knew about her life. Her mother was sick and might not recover. She, Desdemona, and Henderson would now be the ones who talked to the doctors, who made decisions, who sorted through brittle, decades-old documents to find out what their mother would have wanted. Holly was numb with shock.
The three of them were the only mourners besides Aunt Muriel’s even more ancient next-door neighbor and the woman who sold Muriel knitting supplies. Holly tried to pay attention as a minister who looked like a bullfrog, his bulging neck wider than his head, gave a stock eulogy. She studied the casket, its fine wood grain shining in the amber light filtering through the stained glass, and briefly wondered who, in the end, would pay for it.
On the drive home from the funeral, Holly’s thoughts returned to the mail and the check she was expecting. She felt guilty worrying about money when her mother was lying in a hospital bed, but the house. The mortgage. She had never missed a payment, even after Chris’s life insurance ran out. She realized for the first time that she could, in fact, lose the house, and that terminology had her imagining the futile drive around Bertram Corners looking for it on empty lots and behind supermarkets.
What if the check wasn’t in the mail today?
The Virtues of Oxygen Page 3
