“Thanks,” Portia said. “You’re the reason I don’t beat my head against the wall wondering why I went to Vassar. I mean, you moved back to Bertram Corners, and you’ve never regretted it, right?”
Holly picked up a rubber band from Portia’s desk and began to twist it around her fingers. “Do you know how old my husband was when he died?”
“I know he was young.”
Holly had wrapped the rubber band around the tips of two fingers, which were now turning white. “Thirty-seven. Marshall was nine, and Connor was six. He kissed me good-bye one morning, left for work, and had an aneurism when he got to the office. It took me a full year—a full year—to stop waking up in the morning and looking to Chris’s side of the bed, absolutely sure it was all a nightmare. Even now, seven years later, I have nights like that.”
Portia lowered her head. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. And your poor kids.”
Holly pulled the rubber band off her fingers and let the blood flow back. “I know,” she said, taking a deep breath. “But to answer your question, I don’t regret coming back, because this town came together for me after Chris died. Marshall and Connor had a lot of support, especially in those first few years. I know that everyone in town is looking out for them, like we all look out for Vivian. That’s what we do.”
Holly knew forty or fifty e-mails awaited her, bristling with false urgency, but she paused, putting her hands under her thighs as she sat on Portia’s desk. Her impulse to warn Portia that life could pivot drastically without warning needed a little tempering.
“You know that you’ll be fine, right?” Holly said. “You’re smart and you’re resourceful, and you’ll make your own way, if not in this business then in another one. I’m completely confident about that.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I am right,” Holly said, jumping off Portia’s desk. “If I’m right about nothing else, I’m right about that.”
Back in her office, Holly looked at the large paper calendar on the wall, a gift from the bank. She had just sent a check to the very same bank for half of her mortgage with a handwritten note on a Post-it saying she would make up the difference as soon as possible. It wasn’t a complete lie, even if “possible” might actually be “never.” But as her eyes swept across the perfectly boxed days and the neat rows of weeks, she realized that the next month’s mortgage would be due in just a few weeks. And just four weeks after that another check would be due, and another after that. The fear of losing her house consumed her. It felt like she had gone too far underwater and couldn’t be sure she’d have enough air to make it to the surface.
She pulled her eyes from the calendar and tried to breathe slowly and evenly by imagining herself inside an iron lung that did the breathing for her.
“Mom, I’ll be late for school.”
Holly could sense Marshall standing over her even before he started prodding her in the shoulder and shining the bright red digital numbers of the alarm clock in her face. She had been up until two in the morning putting the paper to bed, as she did every Tuesday night before Wednesday’s press run.
“It’s six forty-seven, and I have to be there by seven fifteen. C’mon. I made you some coffee.”
Holly got up, pulled on some sweatpants, and shoved her feet into an old pair of untied running shoes. She felt her way down the stairs, rubbing her eyes as she entered the unnatural glow of the kitchen. Marshall put a cup of coffee into her hand.
“This is the last day I can bring in the money for the band trip.”
Holly fished around in the bill drawer for an envelope with the money she had saved for the trip and counted out two hundred and eighty dollars in twenties into Marshall’s open hand. She had a feeling the money for this band trip was just the beginning of all the cash she would be asked to shell out during his junior year in high school.
“It should be three forty,” he said. “Where’s the rest?”
She counted the money again. Two hundred and eighty, despite her fervent wish that at least a few of the twenties had been stuck together.
“It has to be here,” she said. “I’ve been putting a twenty away every week.”
“Did you take any out?”
She paused, remembering an emergency pizza night a few weeks ago, before the mortgage mess, when she had borrowed from the band fund, intending to pay it back. There may have been a few other emergencies as well.
“I may have accidentally used some of it,” Holly said. An ugly knot of guilt traveled from one internal organ to the next like a pinball as she realized she hadn’t been vigilant enough with her saving. “But,” she quickly added, “I’ll get it today. Just bring this in and tell them you’ll have the rest tomorrow.”
Marshall looked at the twenties as if they were unclean or some kind of pitiful ransom. “Why don’t you just write me a check for the whole thing?”
“When did we all start looking down on legal tender?” she said, taking a long sip of coffee to avoid explaining to Marshall that her checking account could not accommodate his request until her next paycheck hit. It would be worse to bounce a check and have to pay a penalty. “Go get Connor while I start the car.”
Marshall, who played the trumpet, tightened his lips the way trumpet players habitually do and put the cash in his pocket, then headed back upstairs to find his brother. Holly stepped out onto the wet lawn, worried because the Subaru sometimes had trouble starting on the kind of high-humidity days they often had when school was just starting. She got in the car and turned the key, leaning forward in her seat as if that might give the car momentum. The engine sputtered but eventually caught. A few minutes later, Marshall emerged with his backpack slung over one shoulder, and Connor followed, still groggy, eating a slice of bread with peanut butter on it. Marshall’s hair dangled in his eyes so annoyingly that Holly brushed back her own, clearing her forehead. At the same time she promised herself that she would let it go because it wasn’t worth starting the day with an argument. The boys climbed into the car.
“You seriously need a haircut,” Holly said, the words out of her mouth before she could stop them.
“We’re late, Mom.”
“How can you see? It’s like a blindfold.”
Holly backed out of the driveway, cautious of the traffic on the street, now the main access road to a new subdivision of homes for those craving a bonus room and a three-car garage. The new lots hugged the hill behind the Showalter house, which looked like a historic homestead, with its stone foundation and its wide front porch, its peeling paint and its tiny dormer windows. Holly wanted to take the house to dinner and buy it expensive new clothes, but she couldn’t afford to make any improvements. Instead, the ceiling in the kitchen leaked from the shower stall above, the wallpaper in the hall had faded in areas that saw the sunlight, and patches of gray showed through the white exterior paint that Chris had used to change the house color after they bought it. He had always wanted a white house.
“Don’t forget to hold the door handle,” Holly told Connor, who was in the backseat. “I don’t want you flying out this morning.”
“I miss Dad,” Connor said, surprising all of them.
“Me, too,” Marshall said.
“Oh my boys,” Holly said, blindsided once again. A grief counselor had warned Holly that her children would have to reprocess their father’s death at every stage of their development, but the counselor hadn’t addressed how helpless Holly would feel every time it resurfaced. She cleared her throat so that her voice wouldn’t break. “Me, three.”
A few days later, Racine blew into the newspaper office like a fresh breeze off the ocean, and Darla, the lifestyles reporter and calendar editor, spotted him before Holly could run out from her office.
“And how may we help you?” Darla said, coming out from behind the desk where she was presumably writing the weekly community theater roundup Holly had asked for that morning.
“I’m looking for Holly Showalter,” he sa
id, turning around as if he might be in the wrong place. The newspaper office looked like the home of a hoarder, with boxes and papers stacked on every conceivable surface, the sight lines obscured by shelving units full of obsolete phone books. Clearing it out would have qualified as an archeological dig.
Darla, who at barely five feet couldn’t even see over the bookcases, stroked the uppermost of her three chins. “She’s here somewhere,” she said.
Holly could see Darla smiling in a slightly inappropriate way as she took in the whole scene from her office, which had a door she rarely closed and glass walls above waist height. Holly enjoyed seeing Racine from a distance, where she could study his fine bone structure without being self-conscious about her own features.
“May I say who’s asking for her?” Darla asked.
Racine extended a hand to Darla, who looked delighted to take it. “Tell her it’s Racine.”
“Racine,” Darla repeated. “Now doesn’t that sound like an exotic travel destination.”
Holly emerged from her office to cut off whatever Darla might say next. “Hey, there,” she said. “I’m glad you stopped by. I have Vivian’s check for you.”
“Excellent,” he said, running a hand lightly over his hair. “And I was looking for your advice on the storefronts. Could we take a walk?”
“Sure. Just have to finish answering an e-mail. Be right back.”
Racine stayed in the main newsroom, looking around with an amused expression, perhaps at its quaintness, as Darla followed Holly into her office.
“Where do I get one of those?” Darla said in a low voice.
“He’s just someone I’m doing business with,” Holly said as she typed and hit “Send.”
“Doing business. Is that what you kids are calling it now?”
Staring down Darla’s smirk, Holly left her office and led Racine through the warren of the newsroom and out the door. He was wearing some sort of sneaker-shoes with visible stitching that made small squeaking noises with each step, though he didn’t seem to notice.
“I like this town,” he said, glancing into the window of a secondhand sporting goods store a few doors down from the newspaper. “It’s not too pretentious, solidly middle class, which puts it right in the sweet spot of our target market. Any place too upscale means people won’t be seen walking into a place like ours. Too down-and-out means they have nothing of value they haven’t already hocked.”
He said all this with a detachment that both troubled and fascinated Holly. They kept walking.
“It doesn’t bother you,” she said, “that places like this make money because other people are struggling?”
“We provide a needed service. We convert unused assets into something you can buy groceries with. It’s a win-win, really.”
“And you give people a fair price?”
“Absolutely. We’re more generous than the mail-order gold mills, maybe a little less than an established pawn shop, but most people feel uncomfortable walking into a pawn shop. Bottom line, gold has no value sitting in your old jewelry box, so whatever we offer is a net gain.”
Holly nodded, because her own Internet research had confirmed what Racine said. She wasn’t overjoyed to be comparing Vivian’s investment unfavorably to a pawn shop, but then again the gold shop wasn’t a charity. Racine stopped near an empty storefront about half a block from the newspaper office. It had an iron gate on the front windows—unusual for Bertram Corners—and a brick exterior. His Jaguar was parked in front.
“This is the place I like,” he said. “It gives off that solid, respectable vibe, but it’s not ostentatious. What do you think?”
Holly stood back and looked at the shop in the context of its neighbors, a failing video store and a Dunkin’ Donuts.
“The Dunkin’ Donuts will bring in traffic,” she said.
“Exactly my thought,” he said, knocking lightly on the wood frame around the front doorway. “The price is right, too. About a quarter of the rent we’re paying in Brooklyn.”
“I’m not surprised,” Holly told him. “The downtown’s been teetering since the day they opened the mall back in 1986, and then it took another hit with the outlets, which are now killing the mall. It’s amazing any of these places have held on this long.”
“What about your newspaper?” Racine said. “How does that hold on? I thought they were all disappearing.”
Holly paused to look down the street at the assortment of storefronts, which included a dental office, a nail salon, a Chinese restaurant, and a dry cleaner, interspersed with empty buildings that once housed a tailor, a shoe repair shop, a candy store, and a jeweler. She couldn’t deny that the mammoth chain clothing stores, fast-food joints, and ubiquitous purveyors of bitter coffee that banded together in ugly strip malls had sucked the vibrancy right out of Bertram Corners. But the newspaper kept chugging along, even as it reported on the town’s disintegration.
“We’re holding our own,” she said, though she wasn’t completely sure about the latest advertising figures. “We have loyal readers.”
“You’re lucky then. So we’re good on the location?”
“It’s fine with me. Did you ask Vivian?”
“She told me to ask you,” Racine said, laughing. “She said you know the town better than anyone. I tried to talk her into walking me around, because she’s one of my biggest investors in this location, but she made some excuse.”
Holly stopped on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“About Vivian.”
“What about her?”
“She’s got . . . some medical issues,” she said, stopping there.
“She sounds fine on the phone.”
“She holds her own, barring weather mishaps . . .”
Holly was mumbling now, fairly sure that she should stop talking before she said anything she would regret. And yet she wanted to tell Racine something he didn’t know—to bring him inside the loop—because he seemed like a perpetual traveler who kept a polite distance, never quite feeling at home.
“That’s a relief,” Racine said. “Want a lift back to the office?”
“I should stop by Town Hall and chat up the clerk. If I buy her a Diet Coke once a week, she stays on my good side. If I forget, the real estate transactions are late. Oh, here’s that check for you.”
She reached into her purse, pulled out her wallet, and found the check Vivian’s accountant had prepared.
“Be good to it,” Holly meant to say, but it came out “Be good to me.” She stood in the middle of the sidewalk, reddening, as Racine bestowed a radiant smile upon her.
“I will,” he said, and walked away.
CHAPTER 8
Holly walked into Vivian’s living room to find her with Marveen Langdon, the Chronicle’s bookkeeper, who was retouching Vivian’s highlights with a dye kit from the grocery store.
“So I say to him, I say, ‘You’re crazy,’” Marveen said. “No one pays full price for movies anymore. You get your discount tickets from AAA. It’s a no-brainer.”
“Hi, Holly,” Vivian said, smiling from the halo of foil that framed her face. “Marveen is giving me the treatment.”
“I can see that,” Holly said, wondering if Marveen could be talked into cutting and highlighting her hair. She hadn’t been to the salon in a year and had taken to trimming her own hair with the same pair of scissors she used to cut coupons.
“Do you buy AAA discount movie tickets?” Vivian asked Holly. “Marveen seems to think everyone does.”
“Do people still go to the movies? I can’t remember the last movie I saw.”
Vivian and Marveen exchanged a brief glance conveying that Holly was always strapped for cash and was, therefore, an object of pity, even a source of frustration, as though she should get on the stick and make more money so others wouldn’t have to feel guilty about their own spending in her presence. Vivian had a hefty bank balance because her parents had left her
their house, disability insurance covered most of her medical expenses, and she was known to be something of a wizard with her investments. She also had no need to spend money on travel or clothing or furniture or anything else besides the technology that kept her connected to the world.
Marveen made a small salary as the newspaper’s part-time bookkeeper, but her husband was a wealthy executive. She only worked because it provided her with more people to gossip about. Holly hated that her income—or lack thereof—so circumscribed her life, and even more that no one wanted to talk about it, preferring to pretend that money didn’t matter. If it didn’t buy happiness, it bought, she had decided, at least some measure of comfort. The philanthropist and investor Harold Bertram, for whom Bertram Corners had been named, had put it in a rather grotesque way that Holly nevertheless admired: “Worship not penury, for it is but a noose.”
“Are you planning to stay?” Marveen asked.
“I can stay,” Holly said. “When does your shift end?”
“Just another half hour, and then the nurse comes in, but if I can make it to the drugstore today, I won’t have to stop after work. I need a new curling iron.”
Vivian gave Holly a wink as Marveen picked up her purse. The wink referred to their joint opinion that Marveen’s devotion to her hair bordered on the religious. On a daily basis, she straightened it, then curled it, then teased it into a froth that made her three inches taller, and she was tall to start.
Marveen, who was a languid hugger, gave Holly a long, tepid squeeze and then kissed Vivian on the cheek.
“Bye, ladies,” Marveen said as she and her hair left through the front door.
“I’m the first person to admit that I spend way too much time on my hair,” Vivian said once Marveen was gone. “But look at me. What else do I have to fuss about?”
“She must burn through a curling iron every few weeks,” Holly said. “Hey, I need to ask you something. Are you sure you don’t want me to tell Racine about your condition? He’ll hear about it eventually anyway.”
The Virtues of Oxygen Page 5
