Seré Halverson - The Underside of Joy

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.’

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 noticed 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.