Seré Halverson - The Underside of Joy

Lucy found us in the garden. Zach’s superheroes were taking over some long-lost planet from their spaceship Tomato Basket, and Annie had converted Callie into a horse.

I stretched my back and gave Lucy a hug. ‘Your hair’s warm,’ she said. ‘I thought you guys would be in your costumes by now.’

I shrugged. ‘It’s too weird. I can’t even picture it without him.’

‘I know. You’re going, though, right?’

I nodded.

Annie said, ‘I think we should wear our costumes, Mommy.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to, Banannie.’

‘I didn’t. But now I do. And I bet Zach does too.’

Zach nodded and did his uh-huh thing while he threw Batman into the cucumbers. Since Joe had been the town crier who led the songs and read from the Declaration of Independence, the four of us had dressed up in period costumes every Fourth. Annie and I wore long dresses and bonnets; Zach and Joe had pantaloons and vests and black hats.

David was going to take over the emceeing, so he had already picked up Joe’s costume.

‘Okay, then,’ I said.

‘Okay, then.’ Annie hopped off Callie. ‘Let’s get this show on the road, people.’ And she led us up to the house to get changed.

A year ago, I had swayed in the front row, holding Zach on my hip, blowing a plastic kazoo, while my husband stood on the front porch of Capozzi’s Market and led the crowd in ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’ and ‘America the Beautiful’ and ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. When he got to the line ‘I’ve got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart, she’s my Yankee Doodle joy,’ he’d pulled Annie and me and Zach all up onto the porch and twirled us around and around while the crowd cheered and the patched-together band played on. The whole day was one ultra-corny, amateur ode to nostalgia, and I’d loved every minute of it. Can you see me? I was the one leading the march to the beach barbeque as if I were leading a top-university marching band, my happiness twirling up in the treetops and landing obediently in the solid grip of my hand.

None of us could have imagined then that the jovial man who’d sung out, holding his hat to his heart in front of his grandpa Sergio’s store, would soon be a part of the history we celebrated. Or that he’d been dancing on the front porch of his hidden failure. Now I languished towards the back, sweating in my long, heavy dress, nodding and smiling to those who offered hugs or squeezed my arm; there was nothing left for any of us to say. I got through the moment of silence held in Joe’s honour, and ‘Yankee Doodle’, but it was when David started us in on ‘This Land Is Your Land’, and we got to the line, ‘From the redwood forest to the river’s waters’ — those last lyrics Joe had changed to fit Elbow — that tears ran down my cheeks. Lucy handed me a tissue. The tears weren’t all sadness, though. Joe was gone. But his land was my land, his town was my town, his kids were my kids. I really had found home when I’d found Joe, and it was my home still.

‘I’m scared,’ I told Lucy later, while we sat on a rock watching Annie and Zach build a sand castle that looked more like a sand Quonset hut, the crowd dispersing to head upriver for the fireworks. Across the river, hungry cries echoed from the large osprey nest on top of a dead tree that Joe had photographed less than a month before. ‘I suddenly feel constantly aware of how much I can lose.’

She put her arm around me. ‘Most people in your circumstances can’t even see anything past what they’ve already lost.’

‘Yeah. But not everyone has them.’ I jutted my chin towards the kids. ‘I never let myself think like this before. It all feels ridiculously fragile.’

‘You were kind of la-tee-da,’ Lucy admitted. ‘I mean, no one’s life is quite that carefree.’

‘What do you mean?’

Lucy blushed. ‘I didn’t mean… well, you know. Nothing. Too much wine and too much sun make me blabber nonsense.’

It stung. La-tee-da? But I didn’t want to ask. Maybe Frank had told her about the store. Frank could be a blabbermouth, with or without wine and sun. While Annie and Zach scooped river water into their plastic pails, Callie and a border collie raced down the beach towards the water. ‘No!’ I called out. But it was too late. They landed smack-dab on top of the kids’ sand creation and flattened it.

If Elbow was still my town, Capozzi’s Market was now my store, and the bills were now my bills. Julie Langer, one of the school moms, insisted on taking the kids for a play date that Saturday, and so I was left to worry about finances while I dug in my garden.

If only my garden were a true reflection of the workings of my inner soul. All that rich, fertile abundance in precise and ordered rows! No wasted space, no shrivelled stems. And that life-affirming fragrance of clean dirt. I loved the paradox and truth of those two words: Clean. Dirt.

I set down my hand weeder and picked up the compost bucket and headed over to the bins. Our compost was the secret to our garden. And the secret to our compost was keeping the moisture down, giving it enough nitrogen and just the right amount of stirring. This batch was heating up nicely and soon would be ready to spread on the garden. I stirred in the coffee grounds, the egg shells, and the rest of the kitchen waste, along with some magical chicken manure. I added dry leaves I’d saved from the fall. Leaves Joe had raked.

The store, the store. What to do about the store? I didn’t want to just let it die too. It had been so clear to me on the Fourth that along with being the family’s legacy, the store was the heart of our town. Albeit a heart with badly clogged arteries. The tiny town of Elbow could no longer support its own store, and Capozzi’s wasn’t snazzy enough to bring in the wine connoisseurs and the foodies. But the ever-expanding wine country surrounded us, and tourists flocked. Joe had been bugged that everyone in Sebastopol was chopping down their apple trees and putting in grapes, but after living down south, I’d told him, ‘Hey, vineyards beat the heck out of strip malls.’ Still it was a change he didn’t welcome; he called wine country whine country.

I turned the compost, dark as coffee. What did I know about running a store? Absolutely nothing. I could go on with my plan to start working in the fall as a guide. I’d just have to see if they could hire me full-time instead of part-time. Did they even hire full-time guides? And then I’d need to hire a babysitter for Annie and Zach, when they got home in the afternoons. But what would become of Capozzi’s Market? A vacant, cobweb-infested eyesore, the retro sign hanging by its corner, the screen door banging off its hinges while children dared each other to run up to touch the front step, scared by tales of lurking ghosts? If we could somehow save it… with the family’s help… maybe Gina could keep filling in… David and Marcella might be able to work some hours… then I’d have more flexibility. Annie and Zach could hang out sometimes in the afternoons, do their homework in the office and help when they got a little older, like Joe and David had. I added more leaves. But hello? The store was not making it. It was as withered as the oak leaves I stirred into the compost.

Joe’s meal scraps were in there too, decomposing and reincarnating. The last bagel, the last banana peel. The scraps from our last picnic together. I turned the shovel, full of compost. God, he loved those picnics.

He used to say that he wanted to bring back the picnic, that this area was founded on the pleasure of picnics.

That wasn’t how it happened, exactly, but I liked the sound of it, and there was some truth to it: Whites first came to the region not to lay out a blanket under the redwoods but to chop them down. And yet, a hundred or so years ago, San Franciscans started building summer cabins and houses by the river so they could come up to picnic and swim.