The Secret of Joy

by Melissa Senate

  “About your father?” Rebecca asked.

  “That and everything else. I finally told him about our conversation, about the money and the DNA test, that I don’t even want the money, and he flipped out. So I accused him of wanting the money, of only caring about that, and he got so angry and insisted we leave.”

  “Do you really think he only cares about the money?” Rebecca didn’t know Harry well, of course, but she’d spent the weekend with him in that lodge and she’d bet anything he didn’t care about the money at all. He cared about Joy.

  Joy shrugged. “It’d be nice to have, wouldn’t it? I get it. I just … I don’t know. Do you and Harry really think I don’t want half a million dollars? Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars? Rex’s education will be assured. Our home can be paid for in full. We can buy a new car instead of constantly dumping money into the old one just to pass inspection each year. And I could do fewer tours. And Harry could take a vacation instead of working twenty-four/seven. And my parents could finally retire if they want. Yeah, the money would be nice. But it doesn’t feel like mine. It doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. I hate that there’s nothing behind it, nothing attached to it. That’s what Harry doesn’t get.”

  “But there is something attached,” Rebecca said gently. “The letters Daniel Strand wrote you. Maybe it would help if you read them.”

  Joy shook her head. “I don’t want to read them. Harry doesn’t get that, either. He keeps saying I’m emotionally blocked and this is the sterling example.”

  He has a point, Joy, Rebecca thought. There would come a day when she and Joy would be able to argue and bicker like sisters did, when Rebecca could say what needed to be said, and she wouldn’t have to worry that Joy would slam the door. Because that’s what sisters did—they argued and bickered and then made up, because they were sisters. The door was always open.

  “I don’t know how you’ll feel about this suggestion, Joy, but would it help if you talked to your mom about all this? Maybe what she has to say would somehow loosen all this for you a little.”

  Joy let out a deep breath. “Maybe it would. I don’t know that, either. I never talk about it with her. I will, though, if the DNA test confirms that your father is definitely my father. Otherwise, like I said, the money is a moot point if he’s not.”

  “Moot or not,” Harry said from the doorway, “we need some help.” He came into the living room and sat across from them. “Rebecca, I want to hire you as a mediator. I think Joy and I need to sit down and really talk this out with someone impartial guiding us, leading us back to center when things get heated.”

  “She’s hardly impartial,” Joy said.

  “Why not?” Harry said. “You’re the one who keeps calling her a stranger.”

  Touché, Harry.

  Joy was silent for a moment, then turned to Rebecca. “What would it be like? The sessions, I mean.”

  “Whoa,” Rebecca said. “I’m not a marriage counselor. I’m not even a trained mediator. I don’t have a degree in counseling or a certificate in anything. I’m just a paralegal in a divorce mediation firm. Was.”

  “We’ve seen you in action,” Harry said. “You’re good at this. I don’t want to go to some marriage counselor who has no idea who we are. I can’t stand the idea of starting at the beginning when we’re in the middle.”

  “I can understand that,” Rebecca said. She turned to Joy. “Are you okay with it? If you’re game. I am.”

  “What will it be like?” she asked again. “How does it work? He says his piece and I say mine? Is it just arguing back and forth?”

  “What I’d try to do is limit the arguing. Yeah, Harry says his piece—but you listen. Then I ask both of you questions about it. If there’s arguing, I change tacks. And then you say your piece, and Harry listens. And then I ask you both questions about it. And somewhere in there, both of you start to hear each other a little better. And hopefully, you start seeing things from the other’s perspective. You take some time with it. And you mix all that together with how much love there is between you, and things start to change.”

  “That does sound good,” Joy said. “You can really accomplish that?”

  “Not so much me. You. And you,” she added to Harry. “I could come here, if you’d feel more comfortable on your turf, or if you want a neutral zone, you can come to my house.”

  “I’d prefer here,” Joy said.

  “How about Monday at six p.m.,” Harry asked.

  “Monday at six, it is,” Rebecca said.

  Joy reached into her purse and pulled out some bills and held them out to Rebecca. “For tonight.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “I won’t take money for tonight. And I won’t take money for the sessions. Take it or leave it.”

  Harry smiled. “You drive a tough bargain.”

  “You’re used to that,” Joy said with a smile, and Rebecca knew her work would be difficult, but not that difficult. This was not a divorcing couple. This was a couple with much, much more than a flicker of love.

  This was a couple deeply in love, truly committed to each other, yet having some serious problems in hearing each other, compromising, accepting.

  And bringing them back together would be Rebecca’s greatest pleasure.

  • • •

  The chimes of Rebecca’s cell phone woke her up. She glanced at the clock on her bedside table. It was after two in the morning.

  Michael. “So I think you should know that my relationship with my new friend has progressed to something slightly romantic.”

  Rebecca leaned back against her pillows. “Did you just leave her apartment or something?”

  “I’m home now. Sitting on the sofa and feeling like shit.”

  “I’m dating someone, too,” she said softly.

  “Great, so we’re seeing other people. Or did we break up and someone forgot to tell me?”

  She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said, “I sent in the DNA test. I’ll have the results by the end of next week. It was nice of you to enclose the check, by the way.”

  “I thought you might need it, if the test proves she’s your sister and you hand her seven hundred thousand dollars.” At her silence, he added, “If she is, are you going to stay up there? Permanently?”

  She got out of bed and walked over to the windows and sat on the little padded bench. She looked out into the inky darkness. There were no stars twinkling tonight. “I don’t know, Michael. I really don’t know. I just feel like I’m between two worlds right now, and right now, this is where I need to be.”

  “Where you want to be, Rebecca.”

  “Where I want to be, then.”

  “How much longer do you expect me to give you? This indefinite crap is wearing thin. Or are you saying it’s up to me? That if I want to call it a day, all I have to do is say so, and you’ll hang up and go screw your new boyfriend.”

  She went back to her bed and slid under the comforter, pulling it up to her chin. “I suppose it is up to you, Michael. I don’t know for sure how I feel about anything right now. I know that there was once something incredible between us, but that it’s been gone for a long time.”

  Silence. And then: “Do you think we can get it back? It was weird being with someone else, Becs.”

  It wasn’t for me, though, she thought. Should it have been? Did that mean she really didn’t love Michael? Why didn’t she know? “Do you think we can?”

  “I don’t know. But I know we can’t while you’re living more than three hundred miles away.”

  “I can’t come back right now.”

  “You’ve said that over and over, and I still don’t know why. Is it the guy?”

  “He’s part of it,” she said. “But I felt this way before we became involved.”

  “I’m sick of talking about this,” he said. “Nothing changes. Am I supposed to give you an ultimatum? You’ll just choose to stay there and give me the same answer, that you’re not ready to come home. I’m not going
to be here indefinitely, Rebecca. I’m sure you’re aware of that. So let’s just hang up. There’ll come a point when this will be intolerable to me.” Click.

  She put the phone back on her bedside table, and opened the drawer where she’d put the photo of herself and Michael. Why wasn’t she ready to let go of him? If her father was still alive, she’d still be living with Michael, still be working at Whitman, Goldberg & Whitman. Still be living the same old life. And if her father had died without telling her about Joy, it would be the same still.

  Why was knowing the difference?

  Maggie’s words came back to her: “He was telling you he wasn’t leaving you all alone in the world, that you didn’t have to marry Michael.”

  He was telling her she had family out there, that if Michael wasn’t really family, if he didn’t feel like family, she could go find family somewhere else. And she had.

  sixteen

  The next morning, Rebecca sat under a tree in the little park near the center of town, the brilliant red of the leaves reminding her just how long she’d been here. Long enough to send Michael to his gym rat.

  As if she were any different. She’d developed a crush on Theo from the moment she saw him.

  Rebecca leaned her back up against the tree and stared up at the cottony white clouds moving through the bright blue sky.

  “Hey.”

  Rebecca was startled to see Joy Jayhawk standing on the path. Her blond hair was in a low ponytail and she wore a dark denim jacket, another reminder that late summer had turned into fall. Rebecca was surprised that Joy had called out to her; Rebecca’s eyes had been closed and Joy could have hurried past without being spotted. But she’d chosen to say hello.

  That was something.

  “I wasn’t sure if you were asleep,” Joy said, stepping onto the grass and walking over to where Rebecca sat. Charlie came running over with his little squeaky toy, and Joy petted him on the back and threw the rubber cat, sending Charlie scampering after it.

  “Just thinking about some stuff,” Rebecca said, squinting up at Joy in the bright sunshine. “I’ve got some relationship woes of my own.”

  Joy glanced over at Charlie, who was racing back with the rubber cat. She threw it again, and Charlie went running. “The boyfriend back home and the new guy?”

  Rebecca nodded. “Michael is basically telling me he’s not going to wait much longer, and I understand that. I’m leaving him hanging and … then there’s Theo.”

  “So things have progressed between you two?” she asked, sitting down beside Rebecca. She plucked out a long blade of grass.

  “Seriously progressed.” She closed her eyes again. “I wish I knew what to do, how I felt. Michael and I have been together for two years. He’s been with me through some very hard times. He was there when my dad—”

  “Died,” Joy finished.

  Rebecca glanced at Joy. “He arranged the funeral for me. He did everything.”

  Charlie ran over and dropped the toy by Joy’s knee, then chased after a white butterfly. “And yet you’re seeing someone else.”

  Guilt crept up along her spine. “Michael’s a good person, but things between us have been so … wrong lately. I used to think we were just going through phases, since we’ve been living together for a year and we sometimes get on each other’s nerves. I mean, that’s normal, right?”

  “Normal enough that my husband is living in the basement,” Joy said, then suddenly stood up as though she realized the conversation was getting too personal. Too … sisterly. And outside the context of Rebecca as mediator. “I have to get going. Preschool pickup. See you Monday night,” she said, then walked back to the path, stopping to pet Charlie.

  Rebecca watched Joy until she disappeared around a bend. This was the first time they’d talked about her, about her troubles. The way sisters did. It didn’t answer any of her questions about Michael and Theo, but it sure made her feel better.

  “You don’t understand,” Joy snapped at Harry for the tenth time. Or was it the eleventh?

  Rebecca had been sitting on the Jayhawk-Joneses’ love seat for twenty minutes, Joy and Harry on the sofa across from her, each on an opposite end, Joy completely rigid like a marionette with an imaginary string holding up her body with perfect posture, and Harry sprawled out as though trying to take up as much room as possible. Joy would say her piece, and Harry would listen with gritted teeth, looking as though he might explode any moment with “What kind of idiot are you?” And Joy, who’d ever so slightly pause at his every sigh, raised eyebrow, and head shake, would stop midsentence and say, “What’s the point?” and cross her arms over her chest. Then Harry would say his piece, and Joy, looking like she might cry or storm off, would either say “That’s not fair” or “You don’t understand.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Harry said for the tenth or possibly eleventh time. And then, for the very first time, he stood up and walked out of the room. Rebecca heard a door slam, then a car starting and backing out of the driveway.

  Joy, her brown eyes a mix of fury and hurt, stalked up the stairs. Rebecca heard another door slam.

  Oh no, oh no, oh no. Why had she thought she could help? She wasn’t a mediator. She wasn’t a marriage counselor. She wasn’t anything, and she was fooling around with someone’s marriage. Not just someone’s—Joy’s.

  In divorce mediation, the end result was all about avoiding a battle, a trial, the back and forth of costly attorneys. What you needed to get the couple to agree to was fairness—and what was fair to each depended on everything from one or both of the spouses’ moods in that moment, to black and white numbers, to inventory, to stuff.

  But saving a marriage wasn’t about what was arbitrarily fair. It was about love.

  Maybe she’d given them too much open air time, too much freedom to say their piece, something they’d been doing on their own. She’d need to come up with a different approach for them. An approach based on the heart, not the bottom line, even if in this case the bottom line was saving the marriage.

  She went into the kitchen and wrote a note on the refrigerator magnet pad:

  Joy and Harry, please don’t be discouraged by tonight. The first time is usually the hardest. It can seem like you’re getting nowhere, but you’re both blowing off steam and getting started in listening. I’d like to try again ASAP.

  —Rebecca

  She imagined Joy coming downstairs in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, finding the note and crumpling it in a ball and stuffing it down the garbage disposal.

  “What you need is one of my world-famous massages and perfect hamburgers,” Theo said.

  She’d called the minute she flung herself inside her car outside the Jayhawk-Jones house, her heart heavy, her shoulders slumped, her mind a jumble of worries. And out came the entire story in a rush of details, details she hadn’t shared with Theo because she’d thought they were too personal to Joy or to both Joy and Harry, but she realized how central she was to the details right now—the DNA test, the inheritance.

  “See you in twenty minutes,” he said.

  “I hope your massages aren’t that well known,” she said, but he had already hung up.

  His massages should be world famous. Between his warm hands and the delicious-smelling Kama Sutra oil, which apparently heated on contact with skin, she completely relaxed. She lay facedown on her bed, and he kneeled over her, kneeding, pressing, smoothing, rubbing. Every now and then he would whisper something sweet or naughty in her ear, but he never took off his own clothes, never touched anything but her back and her feet and her shoulders. He disappeared for a few agonizing moments to draw her a bubble bath, then continued pressing those strong hands of his into her until he whispered, “C’mon,” and led her by the hand into the bathroom.

  “I cook, you soak.”

  He was the perfect man. “Thank you, Theo.”

  And twenty minutes later he appeared with a towel and took his time drying her off and dusting her with his special
powder, which apparently was edible. She smelled so good she could eat herself. Which was a good sign: She was hungry. She’d gotten back her appetite just in time for dinner.

  She came downstairs to find Theo lighting the candles on the kitchen table, two plates with burgers (and she could see they were topped with the works—lettuce, tomato, onions, pickles) and sweet-potato fries, which she loved.

  “Is there anything you can’t do?” she asked, biting into the burger, which was as perfect as he’d proclaimed.

  “I can’t draw a straight line,” he said. “Which is why I’m not an architect. I also can’t make a decent pot of coffee.”

  She smiled. It was true about the coffee.

  “And I can’t go around pretending to be a marriage counselor,” she said, pushing her fries around on her plate. “Michael was right. I’m not a mediator.”

  “Michael your boyfriend,” he said.

  “Michael the something,” she said, instantly regretting it. What was she doing?

  He eyed her, then uncapped the two bottles of Shipyard beer and poured them into the beer mugs she’d thought to buy during her shopping spree, despite never drinking beer. “Joy and Harry are talking, which is always good. Bad is when people retreat but don’t talk, don’t communicate at all. From what you said, they’re still on the same old argument, so that’s nothing new. Which means you didn’t make things worse. They’re just the same. Comfortable and familiar in an unfamiliar area—them talking to you. They’re both new at that. So you’re on the right track.”

  The glow of the candle cast shadows on his handsome face. “How’d you get to be so smart about all this? And how’d you learn to cook so well, anyway?”

  He smiled. “I like working with my hands.”

  She grinned. “I see. I’m happy to have been the recipient more than a few times. Charlie, too. He loves his doghouse.” She upped her chin to look out the window, where Charlie’s little black and white form was curled up on his round bed, his little head hanging over the edge of the bed out of the doghouse.