The Underside of Joy. Seré Prince Halverson
‘Here. At the store.’
‘I’ll be there. Give me a few minutes.’
I made coffee. The coffeepot said three a.m., and I’d thought it was still only ten or eleven. I tried to think: Frank’s face when I’d told him I planned to keep the store. Had he changed the subject? Yes. I remembered. I’d thought it was too difficult for him to picture the store going on without Joe. He’d looked away, asked if Annie was getting excited about starting school, said that Molly had already picked out her Pocahontas lunch box.
I unlocked the front door and let Frank in. He’d pulled on a Giants sweatshirt and his jeans and Uggs. I poured him a cup of coffee.
My teeth chattered, though I wasn’t cold. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Did you know about this?’
‘What this are we talking about?’
‘How many thises are there?’ My voice shook while I tried to keep it low, keep it from screeching.
‘Look. Back up, Ella. I know you have everything in the world to be upset about. But which exact thing are you talking about?’
I took a breath. ‘The store, Frank. The fact that it’s going under, and has been. Way under.’
‘He kept thinking it would turn around, that it was just a slump.’
‘Why didn’t he tell me how bad it was?’
‘Look. Calm down.’
I leaned towards him. ‘Do not,’ I said, ‘tell me to calm down.’
‘Financially, you’ll be –’
‘It’s not about the money!’ I slumped into the chair. ‘He was struggling all alone. I thought that recently the store had hit a slump – but he never told me how bad it was – unless I just had my head too far up my own ass to see it.’ I got up and paced. There was that time he flipped out over Callie’s vet bill. That hadn’t seemed like him, but I’d shrugged it off. And it was true he’d recently let me in on concerns over the store, but it had been struggling for years. ‘How could I have not seen this? I loved this man. I talked to him every day, Frank. And his whole business and livelihood is barrelling down the tubes?’
Frank set down his coffee and pulled me into a hug. His chin moved against my shoulder as he spoke, just like when he came to tell me they’d found Joe’s body.
‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘He didn’t want to bring that shit home. He felt optimistic that it would turn around. “People will get tired of driving to Costco,” he said. I told him that was the beauty of Costco; you only had to drive there once a month and you could load up with every little thing you could ever want for at least a month, if not six. He thought business would turn around any day. He didn’t want it to interfere with what you guys had at home. He wanted your marriage to be different . . . than, you know, what it was like for him and Paige. Look, don’t be mad at Joe. There was a lot of pressure on him to keep that store going.’
Joe had told me that before Grandpa Sergio died, he willed the store to Joe. Sergio said the store would be Joe’s to run, and eventually he would also inherit the land it was on when his parents were gone. Joe quit college and his dream of travelling the world as a photojournalist, and returned home to help his dad run the store. Several years later, he bought the cottage that had once been Sergio’s and Rosemary’s – at a family-discounted price – and married Paige.
‘I’m mostly mad at me, for not seeing it. I mean, I have to admit, I got upset when he did try to talk to me about money. I just had no idea how much he wasn’t saying.’
He shrugged. ‘Everyone’s different, I guess. Lizzie would have been on my ass about it every day.’ That didn’t help. I must have flinched, because then he said, ‘But that’s just Lizzie. Financially, you’ll be fine. My dad’s guy Hank fixed Joe up with a sweet life insurance policy. You need to go home and get some sleep.’
I nodded, pressed my lips together. I didn’t tell him that sweet policy never quite happened. ‘Frank? Thank you. I’m sorry I woke you up and then dumped this all on you.’
‘No worries. Come on, I’ll walk out with you.’
‘You go ahead. I’m going to put stuff away upstairs, and then I’ll head home.’
‘Promise?’
‘Yeah.’
But I went back upstairs and looked through every file again and again. Everything was exactly where it should be; it was just that there were numerous payables files. I drove back home in early morning light and finally felt like I could sleep. I would figure out something.
When I walked into the kitchen, Annie sat on the kitchen counter talking on the phone, clicking her feet together, pink fuzzy socks ricocheting off each other. She giggled. Callie sat alert at my feet, thumping her tail on the floor, hoping doggy treats were in the grocery bags I carried, but they held only the store’s books. Joe had always remembered Callie’s treats.
Annie said into the phone, ‘Okay. I love you too. Bye.’
She hung up. I picked her up off the counter and held her. Her soft tangles of hair tickled my neck. She smelled like the peach girly powder she’d talked me into buying her at Target. My angel of mercy in SpongeBob SquarePants jammies. ‘Morning, Glory.’
‘Morning, Mommy.’
‘Was that Nonna?’
‘No.’
‘Lucy?’
She shook her head.
‘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