Seré Halverson - The Underside of Joy

I was taking down the family photographs when Joe Sr came up and said, ‘Where are you going to put those?’

‘I’m not sure, but definitely in a prominent place. Where do you think they should go?’

He took one from me. It was an old black-and-white. Someone had written in black in the corner, Capozzi’s Market, 1942. Grandma Rosemary stood with two boys in front of the store.

‘Which one was you?’ I asked.

He pointed to the youngest, a boy of about seven or eight wearing a tilted cap and a smudge on his face. The other boy looked like a teenager. ‘I didn’t know you had an older brother.’

He nodded. ‘He died in the war. Fighting for this country.’

‘I’m sorry. That must have been hard.’ He nodded again, still staring at the photograph. ‘Hey, where’s Grandpa Sergio? Is he taking the picture?’

He shook his head. ‘No. He gave his son to fight against Italy, but he wasn’t a citizen yet, so…’

I held up another photo, also dated 1942. ‘He’s not in this one, either.’

‘No, honey. My papa wasn’t around when those pictures were taken… Like I’ve said, he had to go away for a while.’ These photos were taken when he was in the camps. I knew but I didn’t ask. And with that, Joe Sr handed back the photo and turned and walked out the door. I understood. I’d grown up in a family that didn’t talk about certain things, and I felt most at home not asking the questions.

I shuffled through the frames until I came to one, taken later, on the same front porch, with Sergio, Joe Sr, and Joe, as a toddler. Joe’s arms were up, as if he were about to call a touchdown. Both men smiled down at him.

I forced myself to get up in the morning to do not only the things I needed to do, but also some of the things I loved. I fulfilled my duties at the store and spent time with Annie and Zach. Sometimes, in moments that felt a bit like grace, I combined the two, having them help me with restocking, deciding what picnic spots would be featured on the Life’s a Picnic map, which Clem Silver had agreed to draw; he’d even ventured down to the store for a meeting.

At the store, I kept pulling out craft projects for the kids, and in between sanding and painting and hammering, I’d sit down to join them. I found an odd satisfaction in making messes and cleaning them up. I tried to keep my mind clear of anything but the task at hand, whether it was mixing shrimp and mango curry salad or deciding on a pattern for a beaded necklace, then following it exactly: two blue wooden beads followed by three green glass beads followed by one silver. No surprises. As predictable as the minutes ticking by. Until the time I pulled too hard and the string broke, scattering beads under the refrigerator case so that I could retrieve only enough to make a bracelet. And I remembered that even time — especially time — was far from predictable.

We worked in the garden too — harvesting more vegetables than we could ever use. I took bags of artichokes, tomatoes, basil, and more to Marcella and David, who added them to our menu creations.

I made juice Popsicles for Annie and Zach like my mom had made for me, in her old Tupperware Popsicle mould. I even filled Dixie cups with a Milk-Bone and chicken bouillon and froze them for Callie. I was on top of things in a way I never had been. Certainly, I assured myself, in a way Paige had never been and never could be. I was the poster woman for the perfect widow/mother/store saver/dog lover.

But then something would remind me that I really wasn’t all that.

One day I opened the freezer to find Zach’s action figure frozen in a plastic cup of solid ice. Batman lay cold, masked, unmoving, his right arm reaching out for me, urging me to set him free. Zach ran in, sweaty and smudged, asking for apple juice. I held out the human Popsicle, and he said, ‘Mr Freeze zapped him.’ For days, whenever I opened the freezer, I found another victim of Mr Freeze’s in a pie plate or plastic container: Spider-Man, Superman, Robin; apparently even villains like the Joker and Catwoman could not dodge Mr Freeze’s ice machine.

I left them, but soon there was no room in the freezer. ‘Zach,’ I said. ‘Honey? What do you want to do with all these frozen guys? We don’t have any room.’

He shrugged. ‘ I can’t do anything. Dr Solar has to rescue them.’

I asked him when he thought Dr Solar might show up.

He looked out at the fogless morning. ‘Today probably.’

Later, as I hung up clothes on the line, admiring how Grandma Rosemary had held it all together with Sergio gone — part of me tempted to pretend Joe was unfairly locked behind a chain-link fence with barbed wire instead of under a headstone — I heard Zach let out a scream that gave me goose bumps, even in the warm sunshine. I ran up to the house. Zach stood on the back porch, face red, tears streaming.

‘Look what you made me do!’ he wailed.

On the porch, in the direct sun, were the seven plastic containers Zach had lined up that morning, action figures floating facedown in the melted ice.

‘Now they’ve all DROWNED !’

‘Oh, honey…’ Why hadn’t I thought this through?

‘And they’re DEAD ! And they’re never, ever, ever coming back! Even when I’m a big boy.’

I wanted to save every one of the masked hard bodies, the Caped Crusader, the Boy Wonder. I dumped out the water, pointed out that they all had superhuman powers, anyway, and could defy their untimely deaths. Zach had spent hours playing with them every day, and I wanted him to keep enjoying them. But he insisted on burying them. He wanted to have a funeral for them. And I didn’t try to fix this for him, because I couldn’t fix the rest.

So I held him while he sobbed, and I helped him bury the plastic bodies out behind the chicken coop. Zach never asked me again when Daddy was coming back.

He began to understand, bit by bit, then more and more, the difference between Joe’s death and Paige’s departure, and life’s never-ending track of good-byes.

By mid-September, the kids had started school, and we were ready to reopen the store.

We kept the old capozzi’s market sign and, just under it, hung the new sign, life’s a picnic. There was still plenty of picnic weather during the Indian summer, and then the mostly pleasant fall days before the rains set in. But even in the winter, there would be plenty of sunshine between storms that would be perfect for picnickers. The greenhouse addition would provide a backup spot for when the rainstorms came in the deep of winter, and we also set round café tables and chairs on the covered front porch and in one corner of the store, near the woodstove.

Most of the aisles were gone. The deli counter ran along one entire wall. We’d stocked it with an abundance of cold salads — everything from curry chicken to eggplant pasta, and of course Elbow’s famous elbow macaroni salad, which was your basic macaroni salad with salami thrown in, but we called it famous because of the Elbow connection. We offered sandwiches of every kind imaginable, including our Stuffed Special, made from hollowed-out bread rounds and filled with layers of meats, cheeses, vegetables, and pesto. Everything was made from scratch with fresh ingredients, locally grown whenever possible, grass-fed beef, free-range chickens, no hormone additives, and a whole lot of organic. I knew enough about biology and growing vegetables that I had become a pesticide paranoid, and I wanted to make sure that I was nourishing our customers, not slowly poisoning them. Yes, it was more expensive to use top-quality ingredients, and yes, our prices reflected that, but my gut — which happened to be fairly healthy, as far as I knew — was telling me people were ready for Life’s a Picnic.