Seré Halverson - The Underside of Joy

‘What happened to her?’

‘Well. She found him. She actually found him! He’d drunk away everything he’d earned. Penniless, sleeping around, and worse, violent. So she kicked him back out and, ironically, set up a moonshine business during Prohibition, and raised those two kids — my mom and Aunt Lily — with a trapdoor covered by a braided rug under the kitchen table. It’s the same kitchen table I still have.’

I didn’t say anything. I was trying to figure out what part of the story she and I could relate to. Not the secret trapdoor. Not the moonshine business. Not the tiny mother with the two kids on the ship. Not the sneaky drunk husband. Callie barked and I turned to see the squirrel dive for the trunk of an oak and disappear.

‘Ella.’ My mother held my shoulders. ‘We come from a line of strong women. I see that strength in you.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, our faces only inches away, almost too close to each other, too close to all the unspoken. I could have asked more right then, but I knew better; I’d learned my lesson long ago. I stepped back and picked up my wine, and she did the same. ‘Hey, does that mean I get the old pine table? I love that table.’

She raised her glass. ‘Not while I’m still breathing you don’t.’ We clinked our glasses. A wordless toast to another success: once again, we’d talked about my dad without talking about my dad.

The next morning I dropped my mom off at the airport shuttle bus, but not before she offered to postpone leaving and get someone else to cover for her at work.

I didn’t want her to go. But I knew postponing her departure wasn’t going to help us all get to the other side, or wherever the hell we were headed.

And so we drove her to the DoubleTree Inn, where she stepped onto the shuttle bus to the San Francisco airport and I pulled out cookies and juice to distract Zach, who otherwise would have definitely run up and grabbed her. We all waved, and I felt inspired by the fact that Zach’s tantrums from the previous day had vanished. I buckled the kids into their car seats and headed home. At a stoplight, I turned to them and said, ‘I’m sorry I yelled in the car yesterday. That wasn’t a nice way to tell you to stop fighting. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?’

Zach nodded big exaggerated nods and said, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.’ I’d never heard him do that before.

Annie said, ‘Of course we forgive you, silly. But if you need a break, now might be a good time for us to visit Mama in Lost Vegas.’

The person in the car behind us honked, and I just made the light as it turned yellow again. Need a break? That was an odd thing for Annie to say, I thought, but the kids started singing ‘I’ve Got Sixpence’ and seemed almost happy. I didn’t want to ruin the moment by drilling her. I just said, ‘Annie, believe me, I don’t need a break. Being around you and Zach is what I love most in this world.’ But the thought niggled at me. Either Paige was asking Annie to visit, or perhaps Annie had come up with the idea all on her own. I wondered what Paige wanted, but I wondered more what Annie wanted. It made sense that she might want to spend time with Paige. But what if Paige built up something with the kids and then pulled her disappearing act again?

We drove up the driveway, past Joe’s truck parked in its spot; the empty, hollow house waited, hungry, ready to swallow us whole.

Callie trotted up wagging her tail, but I felt as if we walked on a movie set, and everything was an illusion, and once I got closer and looked and prodded a bit, I’d have to face the truth. Maybe the cute, cosy house was just a cardboard façade. The vibrant garden, plastic and dusty silk. Word had got out that the director had abandoned the film and the studio was pulling out of the financing and there the three of us were, standing outside the pretend door without a script. I unlocked the door anyway, and we went inside.

The screen door slammed behind us. ‘Well,’ I said. Annie and Zach stood in the not-so-great room and looked at me, expectantly. ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked. They shook their heads. It was only nine thirty a.m. and my mom had fed us breakfast before she left. The house still smelled of toast and coffee. ‘You want to go out and play?’ They shook their heads again. Outside, the sun made everything sparkly and phony. The birds sang praises. The birds needed to give it a rest.

‘Well,’ I said again. I went to the armoire and pulled open the drawer and picked out three movies. The Sound of Music, Toy Story, and Beauty and the Beast. I walked to my room and closed the blinds and popped in The Sound of Music DVD. I took off my jeans and pulled on my sweats. The kids stood as if they were in a stranger’s house. Movies were for night; they knew the rules. In the kitchen I made popcorn, then climbed into bed with the bowls. After a few minutes, I patted both sides of the bed. ‘Come on.’ And then I sang, ‘Let’s start at the very beginning…’ and they climbed up onto the bed, giggling, plugging their ears. Another family joke Joe had started. Apparently, I didn’t have the world’s best singing voice.

Zach held Bubby with one hand and took his bowl of popcorn with the other. Callie jumped up and stuck her nose in Annie’s bowl, then lay across the foot of the bed, chomping. We didn’t get up to answer the phone. We didn’t get up to answer the door. ‘Shhhh,’ I said when we heard a knock, and they stifled their giggles in the pillows. Even Callie agreed not to bark. She just whined and thumped her tail against the mattress and cocked her head at us as if to say, You know, it could be him…

With Joe’s picture gazing at us from the nightstand, we watched movies and we slept and we watched more movies. For dinner, I ordered a pizza delivered from Pascal’s and stuck in The Little Mermaid. I almost got up to change it as soon as I remembered that Ariel saved Prince Eric from drowning. But I left it in. It might upset them, but better that it happened when they were with me than somewhere else, like at a friend’s house. Or with Paige.

The storm came up. I wrapped my arms around each of them as Prince Eric fell to the bottom of the sea. I wondered again what it had been like for Joe. Had it been like Frank had thought, that he’d hit his head right as he was pulled under, that he didn’t even know he would never see us again? I hoped so. I hoped his last frame of reference was the frame through his lens of the rusty ragged sea cliff against deep blue sky, not thoughts of Annie and Zach crying in my arms. When Ariel lifted Prince Eric up, up, up to the surface, and brought him back to life with her beautiful voice, all three of us had tears streaming down our faces. Annie planted her wet cheek into my neck and said, ‘I wish mermaids were real.’

I said, ‘Yeah, Banannie, me too.’

Zach said, ‘If I were King Triton, I would have ROARED so that all the fishes and mermaids would lift Daddy back up to the AIR ! I muchly would.’ He laid his head in my lap and I smoothed his hair back. But then Zach started to sob, ‘I want my DADDY ! I want my DADDY !’ and Annie broke down too, yelling even louder than Zach, the same words, over and over.

I held on tight. I thought of Great-Grandma Just and her two children on that big ship, headed for the great unknown. Eventually Annie’s and Zach’s yells and tears dissipated, their stuttered breaths evened out, and they finally slept, their small faces streaked with trails of dried salt.

The people of Elbow hung up their black clothes one day, and by the next week they were donning red, white, and blue. It was not out of disrespect for Joe, but in many ways in honour of him. In fact, Joe Sr and Marcella upheld their civic duty by being the first to swaddle their porch columns in Fourth of July banners, while the rest of the town soon followed their lead. Elbow does the Fourth of July like New York City does New Year’s Eve. And if we keep that exaggerated analogy going, Joe was our own Dick Clark, and the front porch at Capozzi’s Market was our own little Times Square. The Beach and Boom Barbeque was a forty-three-year tradition begun by Grandpa Sergio after the war, and it wasn’t going to stop now. Yes, the man who had been sent to an internment camp apparently celebrated the Fourth with a vengeance. Joe had told me that it was such a part of their family’s and town’s tradition, he’d never questioned it.