The Underside of Joy

by Seré Prince Halverson

  In the old rocker in their room, the kids climbed onto my lap and I read to them and stayed until they fell asleep, which was only about five minutes. I noticed a crate of old books that I’d stuck in the back of the closet, now sitting by the rocker. Had the kids dragged that out, looking for something? Most of them were books they’d outgrown or just got bored with, but maybe they seemed new to them again. Or maybe Annie had shown them to Paige.

  I slipped out, quietly closing the door. David handed me a shot of Jack Daniel’s and whispered, ‘She left. She’s outta here.’

  I wasn’t much of a Jack Daniel’s drinker, but I raised the shot and gulped it, then grabbed Joe’s down jacket and went outside. The fog had unfurled, chilling the air and sending home everyone but the closest friends and family, who had crowded inside, looking at photo albums and getting drunk. Through the picture window I watched them, a portrait of a family enduring; the warm lamplight surrounded them like soft, old worn-in love.

  I pulled on Joe’s jacket and headed for the garden. I wanted the company of tomatoes, of scallions, of kale. I craved lying down between their rows, burying my face in their fragrant, damp dirt. Maybe later I’d go down to the redwood circle and lie there, in the middle of that dark arboreal cathedral, Our Lady of Sequoia sempervirens. Joe had told me that the Pomo Indians believed that on a day in October, the forests could talk, that they would give answers to the people’s wishes. But October was still a long way off.

  Lucy came running up behind me. ‘No wandering off alone.’

  ‘Pray tell, why not?’

  ‘You need a friend. And a good bottle of wine. Even better, a friend with her own vineyard.’ She held up a bottle of wine without a label; the designer was still working on it.

  ‘Okay, but let me bum a cigarette.’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t have any.’

  ‘Liar. You’re PMSing.’ I’d kicked a vicious habit fifteen years before in Advanced Biology at Boston U when they showed us a smoker’s lung. I’d transformed into a typical ex-smoker: a zealot who self-righteously preached about seeing the light of not lighting up. But that night a cigarette sounded like salvation. And Lucy was one of those rare breeds who could smoke a few cigarettes a few times a month when she was stressed, usually right before her period. I knew her cycle because it was the same as mine. Moon sisters. We’d met only when I’d moved to Elbow, but we immediately fell into an easy alignment that went way beyond our cycles. She had long black hair, but she said she should have been the redhead because her name was Lucy. Sometimes she called me Ella Mertz. She and David had become my closest friends. Besides Joe.

  We ended up sitting on the bench by the garden, smoking without talking. The cigarette hurt my throat, made me light-headed. She handed me the bottle.

  ‘What, no glasses? Is this the latest craze in Sonoma wine tasting?’

  ‘Yeah, but usually we wrap it in a brown paper bag too.’

  ‘Distinguished.’ I tipped the bottle back and took a swig of pinot noir.

  A voice came from behind us: ‘I just wanted to say good-bye.’ I jerked around to see Paige, who reached out her hand to me. I couldn’t extend my own because I was holding the bottle of wine in one hand and a Marlboro Light in the other. Class act if there ever was one.

  ‘Oh, sorry, here . . .’ I stamped out the cigarette and shoved the bottle back at Lucy. ‘I thought you left.’

  ‘I realized I hadn’t said a word to you since we got here, so I wanted to thank you for letting me come over. I know this must be a difficult time for you.’

  I studied her, saw the origins of Annie’s eyes, Annie’s wilful chin, Zach’s noble forehead. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’ve done a good job with the children,’ she said, her voice cracking the slightest bit, a hairline fracture in the marble goddess. ‘I should be going.’

  I stood. She raised her chin. I did not want a hug from her and figured she probably did not want a hug from me. But we had been hugging people all day – it was what you did at times like this – and so we gave each other stiff pats on the back, a stiff not-quite hug. She did smell good, much better than I did. Better than cigarette smoke and booze.

  When I finally made it to bed, both kids had already left theirs and climbed into ours – mine – and were asleep. I was glad for their company. About two in the morning, Annie sprang up in bed and cried out, ‘Hi, Daddy!’ I jolted awake, expecting to see him standing over us, telling us it was time to get dressed and head out for a picnic.

  Annie smiled in the foggy moonlight, her eyes still closed. I wanted to crawl inside her dream and stay there with her. Callie sighed and laid her head back down over my feet. Zach sucked noisily on his thumb while I tried to let the rhythm lull me back to sleep. Exhaustion had settled into my muscles, bones, and every organ – except my brain, which zigzagged incessantly through moments of my life with Joe. Now I tried to guide it to the few conversations we’d had about Paige, digging up the same information I’d once tossed into the No Need to Dwell pile. Back then, I didn’t want to live in the past, not his or mine. I didn’t ask the questions because I didn’t want to know the answers.

  But I had wanted to make sure their ending was final, that there was no chance they could get back together. The last thing I wanted to be was a home wrecker.

  At the house that first night I met Joe, the only evidence of Paige that I’d noticed was her bathrobe, and when I returned the next evening after a day of job hunting, the bathrobe was gone. Joe must have emptied the house of everything Paige, because I never found another indication that she existed, except for the one photograph of her pregnant.

  ‘Four months ago,’ Joe had said in his one offer of explanation soon after we met, ‘while the kids and I were at my mom’s for Sunday brunch, she packed up all her things.’ We had been lying in bed, a candle flame still creating moving shadows on the wall, long after our own shadows had stilled. ‘She took all her clothes except her bathrobe, which she’d practically been living in.’

  He said Paige had been depressed. She got to the point that she’d forget to change clothes and take a shower. She went to live with her aunt in a trailer park outside of Las Vegas, so at least he knew someone was taking care of her. It was hard for me to imagine someone choosing a trailer park in the desert, leaving behind all the natural beauty of Elbow, the cosy home, let alone Joe and Annie and Zach. But she wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t talk to him. She’d left him a Dear Joe letter.

  ‘She said she was sorry but that she wasn’t meant to be a mother. That the kids would be better off without her. She said she loved them but she wasn’t good for them. She told me she knew I could do this, that I was a natural father in all the ways she wasn’t a natural mother, that my family would help me . . . blah, blah, fucking blah.’

  ‘It’s ironic,’ I told him. I thought about keeping my own failures, well, my own, but I’d already blown every dating rule, so there was no point in stopping then. ‘I’ve wanted to have children, but I haven’t been able to. I was depressed and lethargic, too . . . My ex-husband could tell you similar stories about me wearing the same clothes for three days and forgetting to bathe.’

  I told him about the five babies that didn’t make it. We held each other tighter, as if our embrace could serve as a perfectly fitted cast that could help heal all the broken parts of us.

  My mom had slept on the couch, had a fire going in the woodstove, and was already making coffee and oatmeal, toast and eggs, when I got up. My mother stood in my kitchen in her robe and moccasins, looking like an older version of me – tall, slim, a bit of a hippie – except her braid was salt-and-pepper. I got my red hair from my dad. She held out her arms to me, her silver bracelets clinking, and I entered her hug. Because her husband – my dad – had died when I was eight, she’d been through this, she knew things, but some of them couldn’t be spoken. I loved my mother, but we’d never had the kind of mother–daughter relationship my friends shared with their moms. I’d never screamed t
hat I hated her; we didn’t go through that necessary separation of selves where I declared my individuality, because, truth be told, the shadow cast by my father’s death always loomed between us, keeping us polite and slightly distant. Still, I loved her. I admired her. And I wished, in a way, that I’d felt passionate and comfortable enough to dump my rage and teenage angst on her. Instead, I’d pecked her on the cheek and closed the door to my room and finished my biology homework.

  I poured myself coffee and refilled my mom’s cup. Outside, the fog hadn’t budged since the previous night; the cold grey shroud wrapped itself through the trees, as if trying to comfort them from the very cold it was inflicting upon them. The house, though, literally sparkled. I’d inherited my lack of housekeeping skills from my mother, so she hadn’t had much to do with the cleaning. The night before, Joe’s mother had crouched on her arthritic knees, wiping the hardwood as she crawled out of the front door. She’d washed all the dishes, emptied the compost bucket, and thrown the bags of recyclables into the recycling bin. The only remnants of the funeral were the stuffed refrigerator, the stack of sympathy cards from old friends and new, and the proliferation of calla lilies, irises, lisianthus, and orchids that lined the counters and the old trunk we used as a coffee table.

  While my mom and I drank coffee by the fire, I asked her in the most casual voice I could muster, ‘So? What did you think of Paige?’

  She shrugged, somewhat carefully. ‘A bit . . . I don’t know . . . Barbie comes to mind, I guess. Or maybe it’s insecurity. She’s awfully stiff. And her ankles are a bit on the thick side, don’t you think? Anyway, she’s nothing like you.’ As only a mother could say.

  ‘Insecure? She’s so . . . composed.’

  My mom made a dismissive wave of her hand, then said, ‘It had to be difficult to show up like that . . . But people need to make themselves feel okay. So I can understand why she came. Lord knows all kinds of people came to your father’s funeral.’

  She rarely mentioned my dad. ‘Really? Like who?’

  ‘Oh, you know. I don’t remember who, exactly. It was a long time ago, Jelly.’

  Door closed. I knew better than to press further. ‘But what does Paige want? I’m worried about the kids.’

  ‘You’ve been their mother for three years. Everyone knows that. Including Paige. And with Joe gone, you’re the one constant parent in their lives.’

  ‘She could come back.’

  She sipped her coffee, set down her cup, which read photographers do it in the darkroom. A present Annie had innocently insisted on getting for Joe. ‘I doubt Paige is going to step up now. After three years of doing nothing. And if she did? Like I said, anyone can see you’re their real mom.’ She reached over and grabbed my hand and gave it a long squeeze. She said, ‘We’ve got to talk business. I know it’s the last thing you feel like doing . . .’

  ‘I don’t feel like doing anything.’

  ‘I know. But I can help you with the paperwork. And I’ve only got a few more days.’ She said we needed to check into the life insurance policy, call Social Security, request the death certificate. She sat up straighter and smoothed her robe over her lap. ‘Jelly, I can make the preliminary calls, but they’re all going to want to talk to you . . . okay?’

  No. It was not okay. But I nodded anyway.

  She patted my knee and stood. ‘It will get your mind off that Paige woman.’

  Chapter Five

  Marcella came by to watch the kids while my mom and I drove into Santa Rosa to take care of the paperwork side of death. I stared out of the car window at people going about their business – crossing the street, emerging from buildings, from parked cars, putting change in parking meters, laughing – as my mom drove us back towards Elbow, towards the store. I hadn’t told her that Joe had an old life insurance policy that we were in the middle of updating. As in the beginning of the middle. As in he’d talked to Frank’s dad’s insurance guy, but I hadn’t heard anything else. I thought the old policy was around $50,000, which would buy me a little time to figure out what to do, but not a lot, and this would worry my mom.

  Back in San Diego, I’d worked in a lab in what we used to call the ‘cutting foreskin of biotechnology’ , but I hadn’t kept up on it, hadn’t wanted to, really, since I’d discovered almost my first day on the job that I hated working in a lab. When I was a kid I read Harriet the Spy and felt certain that I wanted to be a spy, or at the least, an investigator. I walked around with my dad’s birding binoculars bouncing on my chest, a yellow spiral-bound notepad jammed in my back pocket. I spied on the mailman. I spied on the neighbours. I spied on our houseguests. I wrote down descriptions just like my dad did when we went bird-watching. But after my dad died, I lost my curiosity about people. They were too complex to capture in a few hastily scribbled notes, too unpredictable and perplexing in their behaviours. I turned my attention to the plants and animals he had started teaching me about just before he died, and later, I majored in biology. Somehow I’d taken a wrong turn and ended up staring at cells under a microscope in that biotech lab instead of tromping through field and lake and wood.

  Now I had the guide job for Fish and Wildlife lined up, but it was part-time, not enough for the three of us to live on and keep the store running. The store was Grandpa Sergio’s, Joe Sr’s, and Joe’s legacy.

  Sergio had started it as a place where the Italian immigrants could find supplies and keep their heritage alive, fulfil their nostalgic longings for their mother country. But during World War II, some of the Italian men, including Sergio, had been sent to internment camps. When Joe had told me, I’d stupidly said, ‘Sergio was Japanese?’

  Joe laughed. ‘Ah, that would be no.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of any Italian internment. How can that be?’

  But Joe explained that, yes, some Italians and Germans, too, had been sent away to camps, though in much smaller numbers than the Japanese Americans. And Italians living in coastal towns had to relocate. Many from Bodega came to Elbow. But there was a reason I’d never heard about Italian internment: No one ever talked about it. The Italian Americans didn’t talk about it, and the U.S. government didn’t talk about it.

  ‘But it happened,’ Joe said. ‘Grandpa never liked to discuss it. Same with Pop. But that’s why Sergio and Rosemary insisted we call them Grandpa and Grandma instead of Nonno and Nonna. There had been a big push during the war not to speak Italian. Another one of the fallouts was that Capozzi’s Market lost its “Everything Italia” motto and became an Americanized hybrid. The mozzarella made room for the Velveeta. I think the store – along with Grandpa Sergio – kind of lost its . . . passion.’ He shrugged. He took a long pause before he added, ‘Trying to be what it thought it was supposed to be. Playing it safe.’ I wondered, the way Joe’s voice trailed off, if he was talking about himself as much as he was Sergio. But I didn’t ask. Part of me didn’t want to know.

  My mom turned into the parking lot where Joe and I had first met. The wooden screen door slammed behind us when we walked in; the floors creaked hello. Joe was everywhere. Every detail, no matter how mundane, now held significance. The store – hybrid as it was – had composition, like his photographs. Somehow, and I don’t quite know how he did it, the way he arranged everything – from the oranges and lemons, the onions and leeks, the Brussels sprouts and artichokes and cabbage in the produce section, to the aisles of canned and boxed goods and even the meat and fish behind the glass case – every item complemented another, so that when you opened that ancient screen door, felt the fan whirring up above and smelled the mixture of old wood and fresh vegetables and hot coffee, saw his scrawl on the chalkboard with the day’s specials, you felt as if you were walking into a photograph of a time when everything was whole and good.

  But the store that had been Joe was already fading. His cousin Gina had tried, but her careful handwriting on the chalkboard reminded me of a classroom, not the deli. The produce looked tired. I smelled bleach, not soup. Down one of the aisles, I noti
ced something that couldn’t have just appeared in the past few days: a layer of dust on the soup cans and boxes of pasta.

  I hugged Gina, who was as limp as the lettuce, then went upstairs to Joe’s office. I let my hands linger over his desk before I opened the right-side drawer, pushed back the other files, pulled out the one marked Life Insurance. There it was: $50,000. Marcella and Joe Sr had bought him the policy when he and Paige married, years before the kids were born. We had changed it, naming me as the beneficiary, but increasing the amount became a work in progress. I found the forms from Hank Halstrom Insurance that Joe had started to fill out, but that wave came out of nowhere, and the forms were still here, waiting to be finished, waiting to be sent, waiting for business to pick up, so we could afford the higher payment.

  There, on the first page only, was the handwriting that should have been on the chalkboard, the boyish quality of it. I traced the letters with my fingertip. Not long before, he’d sat in the same place, hunched over the same forms, just in case . . . someday . . . Had he wondered about his death then? About how? Or when? Or how the three of us would have to find a way to get up the next day without him, and the next?

  I pulled a tissue out of my pocket and blotted the tear that had fallen on the form. I was not going to start that again. I held the tissue against my eyes, as if I could push the tears back inside their ducts. In some ways it was harder to be in the store than at home. Had I even set foot in this office before without Joe? He was the last person to sit in this chair, to rest his rough elbows on this desk, to punch our phone number into this phone, to speak into the receiver, to say, ‘Hey, I’m heading home. Got the milk and peanut butter. Anything else?’

  My mom was waiting. I took the insurance file and a thick stack of unopened envelopes that had been shoved in the to-do file.

  I hadn’t got involved with the bills. Joe had his system in place when I moved in. Besides, I was a mess when it came to paperwork. My mother would tell me this was an opportunity for personal growth. Time to embrace paperwork. Time to stop blubbering and get home to Annie and Zach.