Seré Halverson - The Underside of Joy

‘Is this a guessing game?’

She shook her head again.

‘Then spill it, buster. Uncle David?’

‘No, silly.’ She reached up and ruffled the hair on the top of my head, like she was the grown-up. ‘It was Mama.’

Annie quit ruffling my hair and said, ‘What’s wrong, Mommy?’

I shook my head and forced the smile that had been refusing to show up and do its job. ‘Nothing.’

‘You don’t like Mama, do you?’

‘Well…’ I chose my words, plucking a few out of my internal tirade so that Damn right, I can’t stand the sight of her, I don’t want her to call you or touch you or know you got edited down until I strung together ‘I don’t… know her.’ But how could I, when she never visited or even called once in three years? Nice mother. Seems like she couldn’t care less came out ‘But… she… seems… nice.’ The effect was less than genuine.

But Annie, sweetly, genuinely, held up an honestly hopeful conversation on her end. ‘She is very nice. She likes you. I think you could be friends like you and Lucy.’ She held both hands out and shrugged, as if to say, Where’s the hard part here?

‘Oh, you do, do you!’ I tickled her until she squealed, then set her down. ‘How about some breakfast?’

‘Zachosaurus!’ Annie said, all big sisterly, and ran, then skidded over to Zach, who had just appeared in the kitchen in his fleece-footed jammies, dragging his Bubby and brontosaurus, his hair sticking out like a confused compass. I picked him up and breathed him in. Zachosaurus. No one ever called him that but Joe and Annie and me. I wondered if Paige would now too.

While the kids gathered eggs and my mom slept, I sat on the back porch drinking more coffee, my mind pinging from the kids to Paige to Joe to the store to our bank account. I looked to the trees. They always calmed me. The redwood grove stood like our own appointed guards; their trunks rose straight and solid from the land, their branches so large, we had seen wild turkeys perched in them. The birds huddled, as big as Labradors, barely able to scrabble up from one branch to the other, letting out shrill laughter that kept startling us, as if a bunch of old British ladies were up there, gossiping. We watched them for hours one winter afternoon, a giant’s version of a partridge in a pear tree.

Our oaks were more like wise, arthritic grandparents. If you pulled up a chair and sat awhile and listened, you usually learned something useful. The fruit trees were like our cherished aunties, wearing frilly dresses and an overabundance of perfume in the spring, then by summer, indulging us with their generosity, dropping apples and pears and apricots by the bucketfuls, more than we could ever eat, as if they were saying, Mangia! Mangia!

By the time my mom woke up and joined me with her coffee, I felt somewhat better from my group-therapy session with the trees. I wasn’t as worried about starving, anyway.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘I conked out. I didn’t even hear you come in last night.’ She took a sip from her cup. ‘Jelly Bean.’ She leaned over and moved a strand of my hair off my face. ‘We need to talk. I have to head back tomorrow, and we haven’t really had a chance to talk about the insurance and your whole financial picture. I can help you figure it out, but they need me back at the centre the day after tomorrow.’

I didn’t tell her that although she had slept, I hadn’t, and I was in no shape to discuss what I’d discovered. I hadn’t even begun to wrap my mind around the whole situation. And as stoic as she could be about some things, like the time Zach wiped the contents of his diaper all over the crib, systematically covering each wooden slat with baby poop, this little financial dilemma would positively and completely freak her out. My mom worked as a bookkeeper for a nonprofit. She didn’t make a lot of money, but she lived simply and, with the help of my dad’s life insurance, had managed to never go broke. And so I said, ‘It’s all fine. I just need to talk to an accountant in the next few weeks.’

She looked at me, sipped her coffee, kept assessing me. ‘You’re exhausted. Are you sleeping?’

I shrugged, teeter-tottered my hand.

‘Why don’t you try to rest today, then, and I’ll take the kids and go do something. We’ll go to Great America or someplace that will exhaust them, and then everyone will be in the same boat.’

I was tired. But the kids needed me and I needed them. Their birth mother had begun circling and I didn’t know if she was looking for a place to land, or preying, ready to snatch up Annie and Zach, or at best, keeping a distant watch on the nest she’d abandoned years before.

‘Let’s all go. I want to hang out with you guys.’

‘You’re going to have plenty of time with Annie and Zach, honey. Puh-lenty. And I’ll be back as soon as I can. You need to take care of yourself.’

‘I need to be a mom. I can rally. Let me have another three cups of coffee and a shower and I’m there.’

When I came back out, my mom was looking through one of our photo albums, shaking her head. ‘You guys really perfected the art of the picnic, didn’t you?’

I sat on the arm of the sofa. The only time the kids ever went to theme parks was when grandparents were involved. Joe and I avoided them. But we went on picnics whenever we could. It was something all four of us loved equally, but for different reasons. Joe liked to pursue his photography and still spend time with his family. I was enthralled with all the redwood-lined hiking trails, the abundance of animal and plant life. The kids loved to catch bugs and see if I could name them. Annie kept a little bug, flower, and bird book in which she painstakingly printed each letter I spelled out to her.

And of course, we all loved to eat. These were not your basic PBJ types of picnics. We made salads and spreads using whatever we could from our garden’s stash, and I discovered an untapped joy of cooking. We had two kids who would eat anything, so I kept trying new ideas and we’d lie back in the sun and groan at how good everything tasted.

‘Honey, would you rather go on a picnic today? It might be easier. We have all that food.’

I shook my head. Going on a picnic without Joe right then would feel like taking a dull knife and cutting a hole through the centre of me… and it wouldn’t feel any better for Annie and Zach. ‘No. Great America it is! Land of the expensive! Home of the brave moms and grandmas! Let’s do it.’

After that day, whenever my mother and I referred to Great America, we called it Ghastly America — and it wasn’t a political statement. It had to do with my lack of sleep and my dead husband and the ninety-five-plus-degree weather and the kids amped up on too much cotton candy and ice cream sandwiches. It had to do with me getting my period, and my body using the occasion to purge my emotions — which suddenly included being extremely pissed off. The heat baked everything, so the only ride that sounded good was the roller coaster called Big Splash. We waited in line for one hour and thirty-five minutes before we realized that Zach was way too short. Annie and my mom went ahead while I stayed behind with Zach, who had a screaming tantrum, not because he couldn’t go on the ride so much as because he couldn’t go with my mom, whom he’d become more and more attached to during the past week.

Zach had been such a laid-back kid, I had very little experience in how to handle a tantrum like that — he screamed and jumped up and down and then splayed himself on the ground, refusing to get up. A blur of people shook their heads and stared. I stood there, unmoving. What did the experts say? I tried to remember something, anything, from one of the parenting magazines I’d read in the doctor’s office. Walk away? Yeah, right. In a crowd of hundreds. Don’t give in. Don’t reward. But I finally got down and yelled over his screams, ‘Zach! Listen! Stop screaming and I’ll buy you another cotton candy! Would you like that?’ He kept wailing. ‘Cotton candy, Zach! Do you hear me?’