"If she were not poor, she would not have lost her teeth, and if she had not lost her teeth, perhaps she would not have remained poor."
The people who received promotions tended to have something that Caroline did not. They had teeth. Caroline's teeth had succumbed to poverty, to the years when she could not afford a dentist.(...)
Caroline's is the face of the working poor, marked by a poverty-generated handicap more obvious than most deficiencies but no different, really, from the less visible deficits that reflect and reinforce destitution.
NYTimes Magazine