“Do you ever wish you could be alone?” she asked me one day. “The kids need me constantly. Sometimes I just fantasize about renting a cheap motel room and bringing a stack of paperbacks so I don’t have to interact with anyone at all. Just for, like, a day.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been left alone for more than a few minutes,” I told her. “I guess I can’t crave what I never had, although it does get tedious sometimes when some of my volunteers want to chat and I’m worn out. Sometimes I just close my eyes and pretend to be asleep. They eventually shut up.”
We bonded, Holly and I, because she asked me those kinds of questions and because she came back week after week, year after year, as others got too busy and dropped off the list or couldn’t handle being close to someone who represented their worst medical fears. No one but Holly thought I would want to talk about the obvious difficulties, but I did. A part of me wanted everyone to know just how hard it was to be me.
CHAPTER 26
Holly ate an aging apple from the fruit bowl on Marveen’s abandoned desk before walking down to the gold store. The apple sloshed around in her otherwise empty stomach as she passed the pharmacy where Darla would be ringing up customers. The economy, as broken as it was, still chugged on for most people, she realized. Even with high unemployment, the vast majority of people had some kind of job, squeezing every last benefit for all it was worth. Only a small minority would be spit out altogether by the economic engine, she thought as she approached Dunkin’ Donuts, the aroma of which almost made her faint. She hadn’t had a good cup of coffee in ages. She stopped in front of the plate-glass window at Dunkin’ Donuts and put on a quick coat of the only lipstick she owned that didn’t require a Q-tip. She pressed her lips together and noticed how the cold air accentuated the lines around her eyes.
The gold store was busy when she came in, so she waited until Racine finished with a customer.
“Can we talk?” she said.
“We need to,” he said, leading her toward the back room.
She put her purse down on a small desk next to which was a single metal folding chair. She noticed that Racine had done nothing to personalize the space in the months the store had been open. Besides the desk and chair, there was a laptop, a phone, and a power strip. The walls were bare, more evidence that Racine would vacuum Bertram Corners for its gold and leave it with nothing but a trace of cologne and the memory of his magnetic smile.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Racine said. He ran a hand over his hair and then dropped it down by his side.
Holly had been so focused on her mother’s ring that she forgot about Vivian’s surprise visit.
“I had no idea what was coming through the door,” he said, his voice strained. “I’ve never even heard of an iron lung before. I had to look it up online after you left.”
“I’m sorry, but Vivian asked me not to say anything,” Holly said. “She said her business partners get nervous when they know about her disability.”
“Then why did she show up?”
Holly paused, not wanting to tell Racine that Vivian mainly wanted to ogle him like the rest of the town. She wondered if he understood just how much he stood out in Bertram Corners. To the residents of a small town, he was like the okapi at the zoo—so unusual that it drew a crowd.
“I think she just wanted an excuse to get out,” Holly said. “She spends all her time in one room, and she gets bored sometimes. I think also she wanted to shake you up a little.”
“Mission accomplished,” he said, running a hand over his hair again.
“Really? Because I thought you handled it so well. You were completely on.”
“On?”
“The charm. You turned it right on, like you do for all the customers.”
“It’s not something I’m conscious of turning on and off,” Racine said, pulling his shoulders back.
“Don’t get upset. It’s a huge asset.”
Racine let his shoulders drop and looked down. “I just wish you had warned me. I thought we had something more than a business relationship.”
Holly wasn’t sure what to say. Part of her was relieved to hear Racine use the word “relationship.” Another part of her thought he was being unfair. She still had to do her job for Vivian.
“We do,” she said. “And you’re right. I should have warned you. But the reason I came over today has nothing to do with that, or with Vivian.”
Racine sat down on the desk. “What then?”
“You know that ring I asked to see yesterday?”
“The diamond with the emerald baguettes.”
“Yes. Do you know where it came from?”
Racine ran a hand over his jawline, which had a day’s worth of stubble on it. He looked like he hadn’t slept much the night before.
“We get most of our resale jewelry from the stores in New York. Why?”
“It’s my mother’s ring.”
Holly was sure that Racine would deny it, but instead he began shuffling through a pile of papers on the desk.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. She’s in a nursing home in Connecticut now, but it went missing a few months ago from her rehab place right after she had a stroke. The staff said we shouldn’t have brought in valuables, so there’s nothing we can do. We’ve been hoping it would turn up, but I never expected to see it here.”
Racine continued rifling through papers until he pulled one out. “It came with a shipment from New York last week.”
“I guess I can’t really prove it’s my mother’s ring. It’s unusual, but I’m not sure it was one of a kind.”
Racine walked out of the back room, unlocked the cabinet, and came back with the ring. “This one, right?” She looked at it again in his palm and nodded, reaching out to take it. Racine closed his hand before she could. “I’ll try to track down what happened. Don’t worry, though. I’ll keep it safe and get it back to you as soon as I can.”
Holly nodded again. If she couldn’t trust him, she needed to know that now.
“I’m sure it’s my mother’s ring,” she said. “And I do need it back.”
“I won’t let you down,” Racine said. He squeezed the ring and held up his fist. “You might not believe it, because of the business I’m in, but I don’t put things before people.”
Then Racine kissed her in a way that could have meant Can’t wait to see you again or Good-bye.
On the way back to the office, Holly stopped into Radio Shack to see what she could buy her boys for Christmas. The cell phones they wanted were far too much money and required monthly payment plans. Anything else was either too expensive or essentially worthless to them—accessories for the phones and game systems they could never have.
She left empty-handed, then walked idly into a used-book store that was closing. She wandered the crammed aisles, examining the titles, when she came upon a hardcover of Where the Red Fern Grows. She pulled it out and examined the worn jacket. This had been Chris’s favorite book as a child, one he’d never had a chance to read to the boys. She started to put it back but changed her mind.
“Do you have a basket?” she asked the ponytailed man at the counter.
He nodded and handed her a plastic container with a handle. She spent the next half hour pulling books from the shelves and CDs from the dusty bins in the back. She pulled anything she thought that Chris would have liked and would have wanted the boys to have: Treasure Island and Catcher in the Rye, CDs of Miles Davis and Nirvana and the Beastie Boys. She filled the basket, and the total came to $89.49, which left her enough money to buy them some candy for their stockings. She left the store feeling that she had hit upon the one gift that wouldn’t be obsolete or out of fashion by January. The one and only thing that would matter.
On Christmas Day each boy had a stack of presents under the tree. Holly watched them open each book and CD and read the inscriptions telling them about Chris’s connection to that story or that music. They took turns reading aloud from
The Hobbit, inside which Holly had written “This was your dad’s favorite book in middle school. He used to say he couldn’t wait to read it with the two of you.” In the glow of the tree her sons had cut down illegally just to show her how much they loved her, she thought that she had never had a more perfect Christmas.
Stan knocked on Holly’s office door as she was putting together the four-page holiday edition that came out between Christmas and New Year’s. It was always the smallest edition of the year so that her staff could take a break over the holidays. Stan looked as if he had eaten some bad clams.
“God, Stan, you look awful,” Holly said. “Sit down. What’s wro . . . oh.”
Holly was certain that the bad-clam expression was now on her own face.
“We’re closing,” said Stan, who nodded, then left his head down.
Holly felt as if she had been punched in the abdomen.
“I’m so sorry, Holly,” he said, finally looking up. “You have until the end of January. The directors were hoping the holiday ads would pick us up, but they didn’t.”
“Is there any hope?” she said, panic starting to rise in her chest again. “Any chance they’ll change their minds?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, slumping down in his chair. “No one’s buying anything. No one’s advertising anything. They’re all just waiting to see what happens, and waiting kills newspapers.”
“Marveen took a leave of absence,” Holly said. “Won’t that buy us a little time?”
“It’s over, Holly. We can offer people the vacation pay that’s coming to them after we close. They have the option to buy into the state insurance plan for up to a year, but essentially everyone should start a job search as soon as possible.”
“In an economy where no one’s hiring.”
“You don’t have to remind me. I’m out, too. My last day is the same as yours.”
“But your kids are in college.”
Stan put his elbows on Holly’s desk and put his head in his hands. He looked up with a sad smile. “Remember when we were idealistic young journalists who thought we could make the world a better place? We wanted to chase out corrupt politicians and uncover fraud and investigate murders. It turns out we were just filling space around the ads, and nobody really cared that much about what we wrote.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret. I never really wanted to do the hard stuff,” Holly said. “I wanted to write stories about the school plays and the Eagle Scout awards and the town budget. I thought that was the important part.”
“It was, Lois,” Stan said, his voice thick. “It was all important. Every word you ever wrote. And don’t forget that.”
“So put on your Superman cape and spin the world backward to turn back time, Clark,” she said, with her own sad smile. “That should fix the problem.”
Stan let out a tired laugh. “The cape’s at the dry cleaner’s, Lois,” he said, “which I can no longer afford.”
By New Year’s Eve, Holly had gotten a few uninformative texts from Racine, but he wasn’t returning her calls. The gold store was opened each day by the appraisers, but she saw few customers inside.
“You’ve tried his cell phone?” Vivian asked her as the clock ticked toward midnight. Vivian’s regular Thursday night volunteer had had New Year’s Eve plans, so Holly had stepped in. The boys were both at parties that involved sleepovers, and she didn’t relish watching the ball drop by herself, nursing a cup of weak tea. Vivian, at least, was good company.
“Of course I’ve tried his cell phone,” Holly said. “He just texts back and says he’s working on something, and he’ll be in touch when he can.”
Holly had told Vivian all about her mother’s ring, but Vivian wanted to talk to Racine before she tried to extricate herself from the investment. Holly worried that the gold store made its real money from stolen merchandise, and if it did, she wondered how Racine could have been unaware of it. From the beginning, her confidence in his sincerity had an inverse relationship to the length of time they were separated.
“Another year,” Vivian said, sighing. “Every year at midnight I’m absolutely sure that I won’t be around to see that damned ridiculous crystal-covered ball drop, and then here I am, watching the whole spectacle again. Have you ever been in Times Square on New Year’s Eve?”
“Are you kidding? That’s the last place I’d want to be, packed into that crowd like a sardine, freezing cold, no place to go to the bathroom. It’s my worst nightmare.”
“And yet they all look so happy.”
“That’s the alcohol.”
“That reminds me. I had Marveen get me a bottle of champagne. Should we open it?”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to drink.”
“I’m not. But I break the rules every now and again. What do you say?”
“Why not?”
Holly went to the kitchen and found the champagne in the refrigerator. She popped the cork, then poured hers into a water glass—Vivian didn’t own wine glasses—and Vivian’s into one of her plastic cups with the attached straw.
It was almost midnight. The ball had already started inching its way down, which always seemed to Holly like the coward’s way to sneak up on the new year. By all rights, she thought, the ball should free-fall and shatter into a million pieces.
“Ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one,” Vivian said, surprising Holly with her enthusiasm. “Happy new year!”
“Happy new year, Vivian,” Holly said, clicking her glass with Vivian’s plastic one. She held the straw to Vivian’s mouth and let her take a sip of champagne before taking one of her own. She had eaten early, so the alcohol hit her almost instantly.
“Nice,” Vivian said. “I feel like a grown-up, even drinking out of a straw.”
“It’s lovely,” Holly said, closing her eyes. “It takes me momentarily out of my mess of a life.”
When Holly opened her eyes again, she could see Vivian staring at her. Once again she felt guilty about calling her life anything less than perfect in Vivian’s presence.
“Tell me what’s going on,” Vivian said. “Well, give me another sip of champagne first, then tell me what’s going on.”
Holly put the straw in Vivian’s mouth and watched her suck down half the glass in one pull. She then took a long sip of her own, feeling the bubbles rising through her brain.
“You really want to know?” Holly said, taking a deep breath. “Well, the bank is about to foreclose on my house because I can’t pay the mortgage anymore—my mother was helping me, but now all her money is tied up in the nursing home. The newspaper is going under at the end of January, so I won’t have a job or health insurance. My rich brother, Henderson, went bankrupt, so I can’t ask him for money, and my sister has even less than I do. And Racine, as you know, is a question mark at best.”
“Oh, Holly,” Vivian said. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“What could you do, Vivian? You’re already paying me for a made-up job.”
Vivian nodded at the cup with the champagne in it, and Holly held it up to her again. She drained it.
“We need a plan,” Vivian said. “And as long as we’re telling the truth here, I should tell you that my accountant says that most of my investments are basically worthless right now. I was heavily into growth stocks that have completely tanked, so my only hope of climbing back right now is the gold store. I haven’t even told him about the ring situation.”
“Vivian, no. That can’t be. What if the store goes under and we can’t get your money back?”
Vivian let out a long shuddering sigh. “I won’t be destitute. I own the house free and clear, and I get my medical disability checks every month. My medical bills are covered. Lots of people live on less. I just wanted to have something to show for all those years my parents sacrificed. I was hoping to make a big charity donation in their names when I died—you know, like those secretive cat ladies who stash money in the mattress and endow a library or something.”
She looked at Holly. “But you’re much more important to me than a library. We’ll figure this out. I’m not going to let you and your boys suffer.”
Holly drained her own champagne. She told Vivian about the boys and their Christmas tree and about the gifts she gave them after selling her wedding ring.
“They deserve so much more,” Holly said, now weeping champagne tears. “I can’t even keep a roof over their heads.”
“You’ve done everything you can. Now it’s time you let someone else help you out.”
For an hour Holly resisted. She wanted to keep her house. Yes, it was falling apart, but it still held their memories, and she didn’t want to give up on Chris’s dream of adding to its history. She thought about his plans to renovate the bathrooms and his stubborn refusal to replace the crushed-stone driveway even after the pebbles, always in the boys’ pockets, ruined their washing machine. But Vivian finally convinced her that holding on to the house would only drag her down. They decided that Holly would send her keys to the bank and move in with Vivian. That would take the pressure off the mortgage situation. When the newspaper closed, Holly would use her unemployment checks to buy into the state’s health insurance plan while she looked for another job.
When the nursing aide came at two in the morning, Holly left Vivian’s feeling simultaneously relieved and tortured. She couldn’t be more grateful to have a free place to live, even if it meant leaving her cherished home behind, but how would the boys react? If she couldn’t find another job, she might end up even more in Vivian’s debt. And what about Racine? She thought he was basically decent, if a little misguided. She never would have pegged him for the kind of man who would run off with stolen goods, especially after she told him what the ring meant to her. And if he had run off, why was he texting her?
As if to respond to the query she threw out to the universe, Holly’s phone rang as she was driving home, and she let it go to voice mail. When she pulled into the driveway, she took the phone out of her purse to see that she had a message.
The Virtues of Oxygen Page 18
