The Virtues of Oxygen (13 page)

CHAPTER 14

O
n Saturday, Holly let the boys sleep in and drove downtown to The Gold Depot. Inside were two middle-aged men in running pants and windbreakers looking like they had taken a detour while jogging; an elderly woman clutching a canvas bag to her chest while she waited for an appraisal; and the Sister Sisters, who were each unwrapping a buttersco
tch candy.

“Holly, dear,” one of the sisters said, waving her over. “Vivian assured us that this business is not one of those scammers. She told us she’s an investor and that you’re helping with it. So we’re here to cash in our trinkets. We realized we could send the money to a mission i
n Africa.”

“What a lovely thing to do,” Holly said. “But I hope you’re not giving up anything special. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, you know. They melt most of
it down.”

One of the sisters pulled a plastic bag out of her purse and showed Holly a tangle of thin chains and gold crosses of vario
us sizes.

“People give us crosses all the time, and we can only wear one,” said the sister holding the bag. “We each picked our favorite, and now we can turn these into something useful. We’re hoping we can b
uy a cow.”

Holly had written enough about the charities that supplied animals to poor families to know that they could afford a scraggly flock of chickens, maybe a goat, but she said nothing. Racine, who was behind the counter showing a watch to one of the joggers, caught her eye and nodded toward the ba
ck office.

Holly went to the office and examined her cuticles as she waited for Racine, who came in about five minutes later. When he saw Holly, he ran a hand over his hair a
nd smiled.

“That was our opening rush,” he said. “I’ve had customers waiting for me to unlock the doors for the last few days. I guess the word is get
ting out.”

“If the Sister Sisters are here, you’re in,” Holly said. “They talk to everyone. And their cash is going to charity, so maybe you can give them an extra go
od price.”

Racine went out and spoke into the ear of the appraiser sifting through the sisters’ gold, then came back into t
he office.

“We’ll take care of them,” he said. “They look like sweet ol
d ladies.”

“Don’t let their looks fool you,” Holly said. “They’ve been on missions all over the world. I heard that one of them worked with Mother Teresa in
Calcutta.”

Racine shook his head, smiling. “I really like this town. You all look out for ea
ch other.”

“We do,” Holly said, a bit surprised that Racine would even notice how the town functioned outside the doors of the g
old store.

“Hey, I notice you haven’t traded in any gold since we opened. We’d definitely give you a go
od price.”

Holly didn’t want to admit that she had traded in her small stash of jewelry long before Racine’s shop had opened in town. The total take had been seventy-eight dollars. She thought about the wedding ring again, wondering what it would actually bring in, but she pushed the tho
ught away.

“So business is picking
up then?”

“No question,” Racine said. “We’re in a great spot, and the price of gold has been climbing steadily since we opened. In a few months, I’ll probably hire a store manager and open another store. These upstate New York towns have a lot of po
tential.”

Holly felt a little let down. Not that she expected Racine to stick around Bertram Corners, but she didn’t realize he would be gon
e so soon.

“You look disappointed,” he said, laughing. “It’s good news for Vivian that things are going
so well.”

“No, of course,” she said quickly, trying to sound upbeat. “She’ll be glad to h
ear that.”

Just then the front door opened, and a couple came inside with a shopping bag that looked heavy, containing perhaps a tea set or a c
andelabra.

“Back to work,” Racine said, heading back out the door. He turned around, though, and leaned his head against the doorframe. His hand came up toward his hair, but he put it do
wn again.

“Hey, would you like to have dinner with me?” he said, flashing the smile that no doubt was responsible for half the customers in the store, maybe even th
e joggers.

“Oh,” Holly said, completely unprepared for the question, though Racine appeared to assume she mea
nt “yes.”

“Today’s out because I have a meeting back in the city later,” he said. “But how abou
t Friday?”

She did a mental inventory of her closet and almost said no because she had nothing to wear but then realized she could borrow something fro
m Marveen.

“Sure,” she said, exiting the office behind him. “So Fri
day then.”

She looked back on her way out of the shop, but Racine was already deep in conversation with the heavy bag couple, and so she couldn’t ask him what time on Friday or where they should meet, but she supposed that such details could be worked out later. Her social skills predated her marriage and were therefore primitive by modern standards. Of course, she thought, he would e-mail or text or call her with the particulars, which meant she would be waiting all week and worrying about a date that he would most likely cancel if a better offer ca
me along.

In the years since Chris died, Holly had gone on a few dates—mostly blind ones arranged by well-meaning friends—but had remained more or less alone. At first there was simply too much grief, and then there were too many obligations, but as the boys got older, she felt even more constrained. In part, she didn’t see too many opportunities in a small town where most of the men in her acceptable age range were either married or so obviously undateable that they were out of the question. But mainly she worried that the boys would find it upsetting to see her dating someone, attempting to replace their father with some inevitably inferior model. In the boys’ minds, their father was something of a tragic hero who had died before he could fulfill all his good intentions of playing ball with them and teaching them how to drive. She bore some responsibility for the deification, because she often pointed out what their father might have said or done had he b
een alive.

“Dad would have been so proud of you tonight,” she told Marshall at his last band concert. “He loved the
trumpet.”

Chris had loved the trumpet no more than he had loved the oboe or the saxophone—he could tolerate jazz but hated classical music—but she somehow couldn’t help herself from creating this custom-made persona for the benefit of her boys, since Chris would never be around to dispute it. All of that meant that any man she dated or married would never live up to the über-Chris, even perhaps in her
own mind.

But Racine was different. He wasn’t a real person in the Bertram Corners sense. He didn’t have dirt under his fingernails or drive a pickup, and he didn’t worship at the altar of chicken wings. Holly saw him as the modern-day version of the charming traveling salesman who wouldn’t be around long enough to complicate her life or the life of her children. She imagined, based on nothing more than their few interactions, that he was the kind of person who didn’t know what he wanted but knew what he didn’t want: commitment, tradition, sticky-handed family gatherings. At another time in her life, she would have shied away from him, but she decided that even a temporary respite from her troubles could be almost like joy itself. And if that was asking too much, at least she’d get a good meal
out of it.

That afternoon, Holly received her first call from the bank. The loan officer was Vince Romano, whom she had known since hi
gh school.

“We’re a little concerned,” Vince said, “that you only sent in half your mortgage payment, and the rest is qu
ite late.”

“I know, Vince. I’m so sorry about that. I’m having a little cash-flow problem, but I’ll wor
k it out.”

“You understand that you’ll be hit with a penalty, right, Holly? That’ll make it even harder to pay ne
xt month.”

“I get it, Vince, but I just don’t have the money right now. If I did, believe me you would have a check in y
our hand.”

Vince paused for a moment, and Holly could hear him shuffling so
me papers.

“I see that you also took out a small home equity loan a while back,
” he said.

“Yes, and I paid the interest on it this month. I remember sending th
at check.”

“If you can’t pay the mortgage, you might want to delay any improvements you were planning. Housing prices have been falling recently, and you might want to keep those funds liquid so you don’t lose t
he house.”

Those words.
Lose
the house.

Holly bent over, unable to keep her head balanced on her shoulders. She felt dizzy. “Are you telling me you’re going to foreclose when I’m late to pay just one time, Vince?” Holly said, because the home equity loan money had been used long ago to pay down some of her credit card debt. “Is that what you’re te
lling me?”

This time she pictured the boys under an overpass, shivering in their garbage-bag raincoats. She would not
allow it.

“Not right away. But if you go another few months without a mortgage payment, we’ll have to start foreclosure proceedings. This is a bank, Holly, not a
charity.”

It stunned her that people now used the word “charity” in an almost pejorative sense, as in, we can’t afford to give our money away like those sloppily managed organizations that toss it out like bubblegum at
a parade.

“I can’t lose the house, Vince. I’ll do everything I can to
catch up.”

Holly hung up the phone with a trembling hand, wondering what to do. She went upstairs to her bedroom, opened her jewelry box and pawed through it, teary eyed, only to realize what she already knew. There was nothing of value left except for the plain gold wedding band. She took out the ring, laid it on her palm, and examined the dull yellow gold and the inscription inside. “Chris and Holly. 1990.” Was this the only thing standing between her and stalling foreclosure? When Holly was a teenager and a college student, her goals were ethereal, though she didn’t know it then. She wanted to make the world a better place by writing about it, telling its stories with what one of her journalism professors had called her gift of writing with great sensitivity toward her subjects. She wore, for example, her frumpiest and least attractive coat when covering a story at the homeless shelter, where the residents were so frail, almost boneless, that they looked as if they had been filleted from their
skeletons.

Now, her goals had become crude and basic. To maintain their home. To stay out of said homeless shelter. To keep her boys from being filleted and boneless. To prevent her children from knowing just how poor they migh
t become.

Connor walked in the open door as she was wiping her eyes and shutting the ring in the box once more, though he didn’t seem
to notice.

“I have a cold, Mom,” he said, sitting down on the bed. At thirteen, he was still on that fulcrum between boyhood and manhood during which sickness easily tipped him toward the former. She smoothed back the bangs on his forehead to check for a fever and felt the cool expanse of his unblemished skin—a blank canvas for all the acne and misery that would surely visit him in the next
few years.

“Poor baby,” she said. “Get into bed, and I’ll bring you
some tea.”

“I’m not that sick,” he said, suddenly shaking off the boy to her regret. “I’m going to Jason’s this afternoon. He’s got a
new game.”

“Okay, hon. Hope you feel better. Is Marshall stil
l asleep?”

“No, he’s been gone for a while. He had band practice,
I think.”

Connor headed back out the door. Holly didn’t know that Marshall had band practice, although she had admittedly fallen a little behind on her son’s complicated schedule. In addition to the trip to Disney World, he had to prepare for the SATs, practice driving with his friend’s father so he could get his license when she had the money for his state-mandated classes and insurance, and start looking at colleges. Connor, of course, was right behind him. Every check she wrote for Marshall would have to be written again a few yea
rs later.

In the spirit of spending as little as possible on herself when her boys needed so much, Holly dug through her underwear drawer until she found a decent black bra that was too small to be comfortable but could be forced into service, and a pair of underwear with a navy-blue pattern that could read as black in a dark room. Now she was set for even the most unlikely outcome of her date and hadn’t spen
t a penny.