The Hole We're In

by Gabrielle Zevin

  “It was a goddamn Mardi Gras,” Britt says woozily.

  “I shouldn’t have asked that,” Vincent says.

  Vincent rushes to help Britt out of the car, and Patsy lets him. He leads the girl into the guest bedroom. He tucks her into bed and closes the door.

  “She’s a trouper,” he says to Patsy.

  Patsy shrugs. “It doesn’t mean anything to her yet.”

  Some day, Patsy thinks, this will all mean something to the girl. Britt will think about what that baby might have been like and whether it could have been the One Who Changed Things for the World and other speculations of this nature. But today it only means a dull pain and relief. This is as it should be.

  Vincent needs to finish editing the documentary he’s working on. “Will you be all right by yourself?” he asks.

  Patsy nods. “Please. Go. We’ve disturbed you enough.” At the clinic, Vinnie had surprised her by paying for the abortion, telling Patsy to put her money back in Britts college fund. Patsy hadn’t needed to be asked twice. “Thank you,” she says again.

  Vincent hugs Patsy. “Have an orange,” he says. He points to a red colander on the white tile countertop.

  Patsy sits down in the sunny breakfast nook of Vincent’s house. It’s one o’clock, still early. She peels an orange and the skin comes off easily. Nothing sticks in her fingernails; the peel is in two long strips. She worries that the orange will be dry or bitter when she bites into it, but it isn’t. It’s sweet and good.

  She finishes the orange, then throws the peels into Vinnie’s compost bin. Good people compost, Patsy thinks, I should compost. And then a sort of joke occurs to her: All people compost eventually. She wants to tell someone, but it seems too hard to relate (So, I was looking at this compost bin...) and not phone-call-worthy anyway.

  She thinks what a beautiful day it is—I could do anything today—and then she yawns and decides that the thing she would most like to do in the whole world is stay perfectly still.

  Around four-thirty, Britt comes down from the guest room. Patsy asks her if it hurts, if she’s bleeding very much. No on both accounts.

  “Can I do anything for you?” Patsy asks.

  “I’d... I’d like to go to the movies maybe.”

  So Patsy takes her daughter to the cinema. The only thing playing near Vinnie is an old war movie. Patsy loathes war movies, but not for the reasons you’d think. She doesn’t hate their schmaltziness or their inaccuracies or their fakeness or their slickness or their oppressive generalities or that she can never see herself or anyone else she knew in them. She hates that they are all those things and yet they can still make her feel.

  About ten minutes into the movie, Patsy starts to get antsy. She tells Britt she’s going to the bathroom, but instead she decides to call Tom. She wants to see how it went with clearing out their flip property.

  “Hey there, little lady,” Tom answers the phone. “How’d it go?”

  “Beautiful,” Patsy replies. And then she feels her eyes grow hot and wet. It’s tension, more than anything, and the release of it. And love—so much love for that surly fifteen-year-old in the movie theater that the heart can hardly stand it. It is lucky, she thinks, that we don’t feel all the love inside us every moment. We couldn’t breathe or walk or eat. It is lucky that it just flares up every now and again then resolves itself into a manageable dormancy.

  “Are you all right?” Tom asks.

  “Happy, I s’pose,” she says. “You know, babe, what I really want to hear about is the flip.”

  “Aw, Patsy, you’re not gonna believe it. You remember that shitty old blue carpet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it was covering the sweetest patch of hardwood you ever seen in your life. I almost cried, I ain’t ashamed to say it. We’re gonna be thousandaires, darlin’.”

  Patsy laughs. Then Tom laughs because Patsy is laughing. “What?” he asks. “Is something funny?”

  “Well,” she begins, “I was looking at this compost bin...”

  She and Tom talk for a brief while longer, and then Patsy returns to the movie. The main character in the film, a female soldier, is having her leg cut off below the knee. Patsy can see that Britt’s eyes are tearing up.

  “Mom, you want me to catch you up on what’s been happening?”

  Patsy shakes her head. “Nah, I been there before.”

  Detour

  THE NEXT DAY, they’re on the road back to Florida. They pass over the border with no problem. A guard asks her what her business in Canada was, and Patsy replies, “Just visiting my brother.” She points to Britt. “Her uncle.”

  “My spring break,” Britt adds cheerily. And in that moment, it’s as if the whole real reason for their trip to Canada has been erased. Patsy can see what the guard sees—a mother and a daughter out to visit Canadian relatives over spring break—and somehow Patsy and Britt magically become those people. Patsy can almost imagine what that trip might have been like.

  Britt sleeps until around noon, when she announces she’s hungry. Patsy is, too, so they stop at a Friendly’s in upstate New York. Patsy’s feeling a bit flush, so she tells her daughter to order anything she wants.

  While they’re waiting for their food, Patsy says, “When I was a girl—a little older than you, I guess—I was in love with this guy. He was black, like Kip, and my parents didn’t exactly love that—”

  Britt interrupts. “Truth, Mom? I don’t want to talk about this kind of stuff today.”

  Their food arrives then. The waitress is a pro. She has remembered to put Patsy’s tomato on the side and toasted the bun as requested. Patsy decides to leave her a ridiculously big tip. That’s the kind of thing you do when you’re on vacation with your teenage daughter.

  They are just passing into Washington, DC, when Patsy’s cell phone rings.

  It’s Patsy’s sister. “I’ve been trying to call you all morning,” Helen says, “but your cell phone’s been off.”

  “I was visiting Vincent. I don’t have service there,” Patsy explains. “And then I forgot to turn it back on.”

  “You went to Canada?” Helen asks. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to Canada? Maybe I could have come.”

  “It was last minute. Britt’s spring break. Why are you calling anyway, Hel?”

  “Dad passed away,” Helen says. “I guess he hadn’t been feeling well for about a week. He thought it was the flu, so he didn’t even go to the doctor. But on Monday morning, he just didn’t get out of bed. He died before he even got to the hospital.” Helen starts to cry, but Patsy does not. “Can you believe it, Patsy? He only just turned seventy-two. And he was always so fit! Megan called me this morning. I’m going to get a flight to Tennessee as soon as I can. Where are you right now?”

  “Virginia,” Patsy says. “I guess I could start driving to Dad’s house.”

  “Good,” Helen says.

  Patsy presses the hang-up button on the phone.

  “What is it?” Britt asks.

  “Your grandfather’s dead.”

  “Oh,” Britt says. “I didn’t really know him. Are you sad?”

  Patsy shrugs. “Not exactly.”

  Buckstop

  MEGAN POMEROY, ROGER’S second wife, answers the door to the little white house that used to be George’s, which used to be Fran’s. Megan is five years younger than Patsy. It had seemed like a big deal at the time Roger and Megan married, but it doesn’t anymore. Patsy will be thirty-nine in December; Megan is nearly thirty-four. We’re all so fucking old, Patsy thinks.

  “Patricia! Britt! I’m so glad to see you both!” Megan embraces them. “I have to keep saying to myself that the pastor’s gone to a better place,” she says tearfully. “He’s really gone to a better place.”

  Patsy knows that Megan has been a good companion to Roger, that this woman is the wife that George never quite was. Megan is devout, for one. Her house is spotless and smells like cinnamon potpourri. The checkbook is always balanced. Her hip
s are slim, and her breasts are pert. This is the home of a perfect Christian wife but for one thing—Megan couldn’t have biological children. She and Roger tried for a while. Five miscarriages and one stillborn carried to term. They have one adopted son, Mintuk, a refugee from some disaster or another.

  “Come in,” Megan says. “You both must be hungry.”

  “Not really,” Britt says.

  “We ate on the road,” Patsy explains.

  “Maybe just something to drink?”

  Patsy and Britt sit primly on the beige, flower-embossed sofa in the living room. Patsy thinks that the couch in a prior upholstery incarnation might have belonged to her mother but she can’t tell for sure. “It was so lucky you guys happened to be on the road!” Megan calls from the kitchen.

  “Yeah!” Patsy calls back.

  “What were you doing in Canada?”

  “Visiting my brother!” Patsy says.

  “My spring break!” Britt adds her part of the routine.

  “Oh, how nice. I spoke to him this morning. He won’t be able to come to Roger’s funeral, but he sent a very beautiful flower arrangement.”

  Patsy thinks that she, too, wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t been on the road already.

  Megan returns with three tumblers filled with lemonade. “I squeezed it myself,” Megan says. “Our lemon tree’s blooming in April. It’s so weird.”

  “Signs of the apocalypse,” Patsy jokes.

  “The burial’s going to be tomorrow. It’s quick, I know, and it’s probably silly of me, but I didn’t want Roger to be just left out rotting. I know it’s just a body, but...”

  Patsy shakes her head. “That doesn’t sound silly.”

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Megan says. She takes Patsy’s hand. “When Magnum died, just tell me one thing. How did you ever stand it?”

  Patsy’s sweet, dumb, beautiful husband is now five years gone. He had been good to her. He had cared for Britt when she was an infant and Patsy was away at the PTSD rehab center in San Diego. He had loved their little girl like his own blood, though he definitely knew otherwise. They had only discussed the subject of Britt’s paternity once, on the day Britt was born. Magnum had said, “Just tell me he’s dead. Tell me he died Over There.” And Patsy had replied, “He’s dead, Magnum.” But Magnum is the one who’s dead now, and Britt’s biological father is alive and well and winning prizes.

  When he passed, the depth of her feeling for the man had astonished her. At times during their marriage, she had felt that she barely liked him, let alone loved him. She had loved Harland; she had loved Smartie. She had been transported by love for those men. But Magnum? Sweet, dumb Magnum? Yes, he was good and—what was it they had called Joseph?—a just man, but...

  Then he had gotten sick, and she had shifted into the role of caretaker, dutifully and without much reflection. One day, his big body was gone and it felt as if a great trick had been played on her. The space in her bed was almost too much to bear. The hole in her life, unexpected and maddening. In the three months following his funeral, she quit her job, put the Buckstop house on the market, got a U-Haul, and drove from Tennessee to Florida. This was how she and Britt had come to live in Orange City.

  During this latest adventure, she has never once allowed herself to long for him. She has not imagined Magnum driving Britt to Canada. She has not imagined him turning the whole ordeal into some sort of educational road trip—how he would have taken their daughter to Graceland or to colleges, for God’s sake. She has certainly not imagined Magnum calling her from the road to say, “Don’t worry, Patsy-cake. It’s done. It’s all taken care of,” and Patsy sobbing with relief and gratitude for her sweet, not-so-dumb husband. “We bought you an Elvis shower curtain,” he would say. “We’ll see you in three days.”

  How had she stood the grief? She hadn’t, not really. “I didn’t,” she says to Megan. “I just do my best to ignore it.”

  Megan apologizes. “I shouldn’t have asked that. It’s not like you’re not mourning Roger, too.”

  “I doubt as much as you.”

  “He was your daddy. Of course it’s as much as me,” Megan insists.

  Patsy says nothing.

  “He loved you, Patsy. All I can tell you is he loved you kids. I wish you could have been in church two Sundays ago. He gave this beautiful sermon about grace, about how he’d never been able to give it to himself or the people he loved best, and how he found it so much easier to say all the important things from the pulpit,” Megan says.

  “Sounds like a good speech,” Patsy says.

  “I tell you, Patsy, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. But later, I was reflecting how it must be hard for you and Vinnie, ’cause you two never go to church. So you never got to hear what a wonderful man your daddy really and truly was.”

  The next afternoon, in ill-fitting black clothes borrowed from Megan, Patsy watches them lower her father’s coffin into the ground and a funny thought occurs to her: You spend your whole life trying to get out of holes. The hole you’re born into because of who your parents are. The hole you dig yourself trying to get out of that first hole. The hole your children are born into is the saddest hole of all. It occurs to her that she has spent most of her life digging herself out of or into one hole or another. And then, in the end, they just lower you into the ground anyway. She whispers a question, kind of like a prayer, if she were the praying sort, to no one in particular, “How in the world do you ever get out?”

  After the funeral, Patsy and Britt go back to the house. Helen is there with her husband, the dentist. So’s the Pharm, who is known as Marcus once again though mainly as Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones is the eighth-grade history teacher at Buckstop Academy; sometimes the kids make fun of his limp. And there’s Marcus’s little sister, Minnie, who did indeed marry Joseph-named-Joseph and has, by all accounts, a deeply happy, deeply ordinary life. And Lacey, too, though Patsy talks to her several times a week anyway. Lacey keeps threatening to move to Orange City to be closer to Patsy and Britt.

  “How did it go in DC?” Lacey asks.

  “Just fine,” Patsy replies. “In the end.”

  Britt and Patsy go into Roger’s office to get away from all their well-meaning relatives. On the desk is a copy of a book entitled God’s Classroom: Revised Edition by Carolyn Murray. The name is familiar, but Patsy cannot quite place it—she certainly doesn’t associate it with the nippleless woman who had been the inadvertent architect of so much of her life. In any case, her father had not gotten very far. There’s a bookmark between pages 12 and 13, and what Patsy thinks is, he’ll never finish it now.

  Britt sits under the window in front of a small teak bookshelf that had once belonged to Patsy. She busies herself flipping through a pile of old family albums.

  “Mom,” Britt asks, “is this you?”

  Patsy sits on the floor next to her daughter. It’s a picture of Patsy in a cheerleading costume, standing in front of the old Texas house. It had been taken before the disastrous red paint job, back when the house was still yellow.

  Patsy nods.

  “Your house was nice.” Britt comments. “You must have been rich.”

  Patsy snorts. “It was all for show.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, my parents didn’t own any of it. They were in debt up to their eyeballs. My mother stole money from your uncle. She stole money from me.”

  “But, their house... it’s way bigger than ours.”

  “I know what it looks like. I know. But if you want to know the difference between me and them—and well, there’re many—but if you want to know the biggest, it’s that I don’t owe nothing to no one. For better or worse, I own my own life.”

  Britt nods and puts the photo album back on the shelf. She hadn’t wanted a lecture on self-reliance, only to poke fun at her mother’s ridiculously skimpy cheerleading skirt.

  Megan comes in from the other room. It’s a small house, this house Roger died in. I
t’s a small house, good for eavesdropping and not minding your own business. “You say you own your own life,” Megan says, one hand on hip. “Well, what about God?”

  Patsy pushes herself up off the floor. She wipes the dust and travel grit from her palms then replies, “What about Him?”

  Acknowledgments

  For a variety of services, my thanks to Stuart Gelwarg, Seth Fishman, Janine O’Malley, Sarah Odedina, Jean Feiwel, Drea Peters, Jessica Monahan, and, as always, my parents. My special thanks to Doug Stewart, Hans Canosa, Caroline Trefler, Michael Hornburg, and my editor, Lauren Wein.