A Measure of Happiness (13 page)

 

Children were everywhere.

In the parking lot skirting Johnson Farm. Running in circles around their harried parents. Sitting atop stacked bales of hay leading to the Johnson Farm corn maze and kicking their feet. Requesting juice and treats.
Pick me up, put me down.

To the left of the maze, pumpkins sat in tidy orange rows, awaiting selection. On the right, the corn maze opened up to a grassy plain that slid out to the ocean.

Katherine focused on her breathing, attempting to calm the self-conscious voice in her head that chanted
my son
in the direction of Zach.

Curtis Johnson, the owner of the farm stand, wore his characteristic straw hat, uncharacteristic rainbow-colored suspenders, and organized the chaos into two jagged lines.

Katherine dug in her purse for her wallet. “My treat,” she said, “since I asked you.” Her words echoed back to her and sounded very much like first date lingo, as though Celeste's snarky voice had embedded in Katherine's gray matter. What had Celeste said?
You two should go together
? Why was it that the last thing you wanted to say was often the first thing that spurted from your mouth?

Zach shook his head and took his wallet from his back pocket. “I've got this,” he said, and strolled up to Curtis Johnson.

When Zach slipped into the back of the line beside Katherine, Curtis held a finger to his lips. “I've got a riddle for you today,” he said, and waited for the crowd to quiet. “A maze turns and twists. It leads you by the nose and pushes you into corners. It twirls you in circles. It leads you astray. Your exit may be close to where you begin . . . or far away. But no matter where you exit, you always end up . . . Where?”

Kids stared at Curtis with their mouths open.Their parents offered Curtis patient grins.

Curtis made eye contact with his rapt audience. “The answer's at the end of the maze, if you get there.”

“Never heard that riddle before,” Zach said. “And I used to ace the Jumbles in the Sunday paper.”

“Jumbles?”

“It's a type of kid riddle?”

Katherine shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Fitzgerald family tradition. Every Sunday, I got the Jumbles and my father and mother did the crossword puzzle together. Ryan got the funnies and Donovan liked the game where you had to figure out what was wrong with the picture. ”

Katherine shook her head again. The underside of her neck warmed with the same shame she'd experienced as a kid whenever someone normal asked her to explain her life.

“You know the two pictures that look almost identical. But there are always subtle differences between them? Like moose antlers hanging off a picture frame or a cat on someone's head or, you know, a tie shoe in one frame and a slip-on in another.”

“Lamontagne family tradition. We didn't get the newspaper,” Katherine said. On TV shows like
The Brady Bunch,
the king of the castle donned reading glasses and read the newspaper. Then he'd peered over those same glasses to dole out worldly advice to his offspring. Katherine's father had peered over the King of Beers to dole out personalized insults.

Curtis Johnson slipped his thumbs beneath his suspenders, playing up the farmer role. According to town gossip, back in high school he'd aspired to acting fame—the Hollywood Hills had beckoned him. But after a short stint in commercials and fifteen minutes of fame playing diarrhea in a Pepto-Bismol commercial, he'd returned to Hidden Harbor, his family's farm, and his suspender-tweaking birthright. “You kids ready to get lost?” he asked.

“Yeah!” a few kids called out, their voices thin and unsure.

Curtis, ever the showman, held a hand to his ear. “I can't hear you!”

Slightly louder calls went up from the crowd.

Curtis shook his head. “That's the best you can do?”

Zach raised a fist in the air, his face alight with mischief. “Woo-hoo! Let's do it!” No wonder Abby's three-year-old had taken an instant liking to Zach.

Curtis stared at Zach. “Now, that's more like it. Everybody in!” Curtis clapped his hands, once for each kid who entered the maze. “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” Parents scrambled to keep up with their kids. When Zach and Katherine passed by Curtis, he merely touched his fingers to the tip of his hat and winked. “Have a nice day, ma'am,” he told Katherine. “Son,” he said to Zach.

“You too, Curtis. I mean, Farmer Johnson,” Katherine said, and she led Zach into the maze.

Corn rose up on either side of them. The nine-foot-high stalk walls stood about ten feet apart, impossible to see beyond but allowing plenty of space for walking side by side. Families with little ones ran ahead. Muffled, disembodied voices sounded from within the maze. Katherine squinted through the bright sun and raised a hand to her forehead as a shield. “Corn mazes weren't part of your family tradition?”

Zach pressed a forefinger to his closed fist, ticking off a list. “Pie-eating contests and bouncy houses at the Arlington Town Day. But, uh, not in that order. Tried that once, lived to regret it.”

“Sounds like you have a fun family, Zach.” Katherine waited for Zach to nod his agreement.

Instead, he ran his hand along the corn, making it rustle beneath his fingers, like playing cards click-clacking against bike spokes. “Singing contests.”

“You sing?” Katherine said. The notion instantly and somewhat ridiculously lit Katherine up inside, as if singing were part of her genetic makeup.

“No,” Zach said. “I can't sing for—” He chuckled. “I don't sing. But my parents and brothers are naturals,” he said, overly emphasizing the word
naturals.

“But not you?” Katherine asked.

“Guess I didn't get the singing DNA.” Zach stared at Katherine, as though daring her to say otherwise. As though daring her to reveal herself.

Zach was good, but she was better, having spent years avoiding her ex-husband's probing questions, his gaze that lingered long after their conversations had concluded. If Katherine didn't know better, she might've concluded that Zach and Barry shared common DNA.

In the house where Katherine had grown up, she and her biological sister, Lexi, didn't share eye color, hair color, or talents. All they'd shared was a common miserable experience. Each of them had handled the crap they were dealt differently. At sixteen years old, Lexi, the wild one, had climbed out the window of the bedroom they'd shared and run away, leaving Katherine to stay and carry on her legacy.

“Any other notable Fitzgerald family traditions?” Katherine asked.

“We used to make our own costumes for Halloween,” Zach said.

“Very cool.”

“My little brothers dressed up as firefighters and cowboys. I made myself a silver costume with an aluminum hat.”

Zach glanced at Katherine, as though pausing for her to decipher his clue. She shrugged. “So the voices couldn't get into your head?”

“Ha! Good one, but no. Because, from the time I was small I'd always felt like an alien in my family. I never felt like I belonged.. . .” Zach's voice trailed off. An opening for Katherine to offer an explanation?

“I never felt like I belonged, either,” Katherine said. “I think that's a common theme, growing up. No matter what kind of a household raises you. Good or bad.”

Ever since Katherine was five and her father told her kindergarten teacher she was an accident, she'd fantasized that she was adopted. That her real family shared pleasant dinner conversation every night and that they always had homemade cupcakes for dessert. That her house smelled like cinnamon toast and melted butter, instead of cigarettes and stale beer. And in this make-believe house, the father never made the mother choose between him and their children. The children always came first.

The maze forked right and left. Katherine jutted out her arm to pause Zach, the way her mother used to hold out her arm whenever she stopped short while driving. As if her slender arm could've kept Katherine from crashing through a windshield. As though her mother had cared to keep Katherine safe.

“What do you think? Right or left?” Katherine peered down both turns, but neither offered a clue. Both appeared equally worn with equal potential.

Zach flopped his arms across each other and crossed his legs at the ankles, like the scarecrow from
The Wizard of Oz.

“Left it is!” Katherine said.

“What about you?”

“What about me?” Katherine's midsection tightened, and her shoulders rose on a breath.

“What were your family traditions?”

Katherine chuckled. “I don't know if this is a tradition. But there is one quirk my father handed down to me, more of a nuisance than anything. I can't tell the difference between some reds and greens.And others look muted. I once scared my driver's ed instructor when I described the traffic light colors—”

Zach made a sound, a cross between a laugh and a sigh. “Orange on the top, yellow in the middle, olive green on the bottom.”

“How'd you guess?”

“I'm slightly color-blind myself,” Zach said, emphasizing the word
blind
.

“What a coincidence?” she said, but even to her ear, the statement sounded like a question. Would Zach notice that, too? What were the chances she'd given birth to a color-blind son? She didn't know the answer to that question. But from the look on Zach's face—his eyes wide and edged with annoyance and his head tilted—he did.

Too late to change her answer?

“Negativity,” Katherine blurted out. “That was our family tradition.”

“Negativity?” Zach asked, as if he'd never heard the term.

Katherine searched her memory for a pleasant tradition. Instead, dark memories scrolled by, reoccurring events having burned themselves into her brain like afterimages. Cautionary tales that might lead Zach to appreciate the family who raised him right, a family who hadn't burdened him with dark memories and darker doubts. Katherine's father had severed blood ties. Yet, back when Katherine was expecting, family ties had nevertheless tugged, threatening to pull her down. Without a doubt, she'd known she couldn't hand down that legacy to her son. She'd known he was better off without her. And then, days later, she thought she'd made a terrible mistake.

Now, having met Zach and hearing about his adoptive family, she knew differently.

“My father was a mean drunk,” Katherine said. “Almost as mean as when he was sober. I truly believe he enjoyed berating people, especially those related to him. I suppose you could say he had a calling. I liked to bake, he liked to try to make his family feel terrible about themselves. I never cared that we were poor. I just wanted my father to be nice to me. All through elementary school, everything I did was an attempt to get him to come around.”

Scrubbing a spotless bathroom, so he'd stop calling her lazy. Pulling all-nighters to study word problems, so he'd stop calling her stupid. Keeping herself from speaking out against him, so he wouldn't send her to bed without dinner.

“Did it work?”

“No. I found other ways to survive.”

By the time she'd hit her teens, she'd mastered algebra, learned to wipe down the bathroom after each shower, realized she could tell her father where to go and what to do when he got there. He couldn't stay awake and guard the refrigerator forever.

Even sauced, her father's brain was sharp, but hers was sharper. Usually.

Katherine stopped short, hitting a cornstalk dead end. “Did I say left? I meant right. Definitely right,” Katherine said. “I've got a strong feeling about this.”

Zach pretended to spin a steering wheel and turned on his heel. “And then you left home, fell in love with Hidden Harbor and Lamontagne's. Only it was called Hazel May's, back in the day,” Zach said, parroting back her words to him, as if he'd memorized their first conversation and was combing it for hidden meaning.

“That's right. I mean, yes, and also left,” Katherine said, turning onto the path they'd previously rejected.

Zach jammed his right hand in his pocket and gave her a tight-lipped grin. The kind that told Katherine he was encouraging himself, that everything up to this point had been small talk. She got a quivery feeling deep in her belly, that knowing before you knew. The clear-cut understanding that a big, important question was coming her way and she wasn't going to like it.

“But you did fall in love with a guy eventually.” Zach's hand moved from his pocket and found the comfort of the cornstalks. He struck every third stalk, scenting the air with dusty earth.

“I told you—”

“You were married. You have an ex-husband.” Zach spoke slowly, quietly, deliberately, the way you'd remind a dementia sufferer of all they'd lost. He touched a hand to his head, and it automatically gravitated to the cowlick, the lock of hair she often caught him worrying. “The gray-haired guy?” Zach said.

“Barry, of course,” she said. “How did you know?”

“Celeste told me. Did you meet him right after you moved here?” Zach asked, his tone airy, not with lightness but the inability to draw a full breath. His bright eyes flashed on hers. Gone was Zach's easy smile. He pulled his expression tight and emotionless as a scarecrow, while awaiting her answer to the question behind the question. The question he hadn't dared to ask.

The understanding caught in her throat, and she took a steadying breath around it. Zach wanted to know whether Barry—the dear, sweet man she currently loved—was his biological father. She wished. She wished awfully hard. But as her mother used to say,
If I had a penny for every wish . . .