The Underside of Joy (6 page)

Chapter Six

‘I missed my plane,’ she said, closing the book and holding it face down. ‘Marcella should be back in a minute. She went to check on Auntie Sophia.’

I nodded, kept nodding. My body shook so hard that one of my knees buckled. A crow shrilled,
Caw-caw-caw,
through the still damp air, staking its claim on a favourite branch or fence post.

Annie grinned at me, but Zach had already slid off Paige’s lap and grabbed my leg. I picked him up, inhaled his fresh, loamy scent, now mixed with the increasingly familiar scent of Paige’s perfume – jasmine, I was pretty sure. And citrus. But it had echoes of Macy’s, not a garden or an orange grove.

My mother, who’d walked in behind me, placed her hand firmly on my back. ‘Hello,’ she said to Paige. ‘Will you be needing a taxi to the airport, then?’

Paige shook her head. ‘I’ve got the rental car.’ She looked at her watch. ‘And it’s just about time to go.’

That, I thought, is an understatement.

I said, ‘It can take a couple hours if you run into traffic . . . Where are you flying to?’
Siberia? Antarctica? The
Moon
?

‘Las Vegas. I left my card on the coffee table . . .’

Why the hell would I want your card?

‘. . . so the kids can call anytime.’

Why would they want to call you? They don’t even know you. They know the plumber better than they know you and they don’t call him.

She hugged Annie for an excruciatingly long minute. My mom raised her eyebrows again. The crows cawed again. The
Corvus brachyrhynchos.
Crows have a bad rap, but they’re highly intelligent, extremely adaptable birds, and I’m always defending them when people complain. Their calls all have many different meanings. I was pretty sure this one was sounding out a warning of some type. Paige finally let go of Annie, got up, and reached for Zach, whom I held a bit too tight. His smile was shy, but he went to her. ‘Bye, Zach.’ Her voice cracked again. Tears magnified her blue eyes, those eyes that looked so much like Annie’s. She kept them from spilling, intent, it seemed, on not making a scene. I gave her credit for that much.

‘Good-bye, Lady,’ Zach said.

She handed him back to me. Finally, finally, Paige stepped out the door, slipped into her high heels, and clicked down the porch stairs.

Her perfume stuck around. I followed Annie to the great room, which Joe had fondly dubbed the not-so-great room. She sat at the watery glass window and watched Paige drive away.

‘Banannie? Are you okay?’ I went to her and knelt beside her.

‘I . . . want . . . my . . . daddy,’ she said in a whisper.

‘I know, honey. I know.’ I held her, but she turned her head so her gaze stayed on the empty gravel river of driveway and the dust clouds Paige left behind. I didn’t know what to say about Paige. She’ll be back? I didn’t know what she was planning on doing . . . or being . . . for Annie and Zach.

Zach tore in the room. ‘Hey, mister!’ he said, pointing to my boots. ‘Shoes go outside. Come on, I’ll show ya.’

My mom raised her eyebrows once again. She could never have Botox; her chief mode of communication lay in her forehead. I said, ‘Hey, mister? I’m no mister, mister!’ He laughed. ‘And these boots were made for walking, not for sitting out on some old porch.’

He stood for a minute with his head tilted, looking up, pondering my statement. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ my little boy said, an expression he’d learned from his grandpa. Then he went outside and pulled on his Batman battery-powered tennies and stomped back into the house, flashing red lights with each step.

After we fed the kids reheated tuna casserole à la the Nardini family, according to the masking tape on the bottom of the glass pan, we set them up for their naps. The
Are You My Mother?
book lay in the rocking chair. I dropped it back in the crate, shoved the crate back into the closet, and read
Little Bear
instead. Neither of them said anything about the Dr Seuss book, and they were both asleep before I got six pages into
Little Bear.
They were as worn out by everything as I was. I tiptoed to the closet and plucked the other book out of the crate, took it outside, and threw it in the trash can.

Back in the house, I picked up Paige’s business card.

PAIGE CAPOZZI

The Home Stager

executive real estate and rental properties

‘When it’s time to stage, call Paige.’ 800-555-7531

‘A home stager,’ I said to my mom, who was doing the dishes.

‘Ahh. An interior decorator type, who comes in and tells you to get rid of all your clutter.’

‘A Grandma Beene.’

‘Exactly. Shirley hired one when she put her house on the market. She had Shirl rent a few pieces of furniture and get rid of that old peach recliner, thank God. She put fresh flowers around and an apple pie in the oven. Had her take down all the family photographs.’

‘Why? That sounds kind of cold.’

‘She said it was so a family coming in can visualize themselves there without being distracted by all your personal stuff. Guess you want to make them feel like they can make it their own simply by stepping in, not having to block out the evidence of your life. She also did a lot of feng shui placement to create positive energy.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Her house never looked so good. She sold it in two days. For above the asking price. You know real estate these days. It just keeps going up. Shirl had to stop herself from buying it back.’

‘I always pictured Paige as this crazy woman living in a trailer park, zoning out on soap operas.’ I looked around the house, saw it through Paige’s eyes. I saw her clearing the shelves, filling trash bags and boxes marked
Goodwill.
The few shoes she didn’t pitch, she would place out on the porch, in obedient lines. ‘What the hell does she want, Mom?’

My mom shook her head. ‘I don’t know. But most likely, nothing. Except, perhaps, to find a way to forgive herself.’

My mom said she wanted to lie down too. I told her to stretch out on my bed. I hadn’t slept much but knew I was too ramped up to close my eyes. I had to at least look at those files.

A thick stack of bills, all stamped
Past Due,
filled the payables folder. What? Joe was not a past-due kind of guy. He was a fanatic about paying his bills on time. If there had been a religious cult called Pay for Your Sins on Time, he would have been appointed their pope, or at least a most honourable guru.

But there it was, right in front of me. Evidence of slack. I leafed through the invoices. He hadn’t paid Ben Aston for three months? Ben Aston had been his main produce supplier for years. He was a friend. Ben had scrawled across the bottom of the most recent bill,
Hey, Joey, Can we take care of this?
The amount due was highlighted: $2,563.47. The bakery bill said
Last Notice before Termination of Service.
In two weeks, the electricity would be shut off if a payment of $1,269 wasn’t made. We owed Teaberry’s Ranch, Donaldson’s Dairy, the beer and wine supplier, and the telephone company. I started sweating. I needed to get outside.

I walked down to the garden and started pulling weeds, but not the way I usually did. Not carefully digging up the root. No. I clawed at them, wildly tearing them, and threw them in a pile.
What in the hell? You die on me? You up and
die
on me? On Annie? On Zach? And you fail to tell me what a god-awful mess you’ve gotten yourself into?
‘You’ve gotten
us
into?’ I stomped on the pile, releasing droves of dandelion and sour-grass seeds to spread in the wind and multiply all over our land. Let them take over. Why should I care? ‘Oh! And Paige shows up? Really? Now? After three years of, uh, let’s see . . . that would be
nothing
? “Hi, I’m Annie and Zach’s
mother
”. What in the hell is
that
about?’

A car door slammed. Over my hissy fit I hadn’t heard Marcella’s Acura pull into the drive. I took deep breaths to calm myself down while Callie cocked her head at me, held her ears back, and asked with her eyes if I’d gone raving mad. I wondered if Marcella had seen my tirade, as I watched her take careful steps down the path. Everything about Marcella was big: her meals, her zest for cleanliness and order, her body, her voice, her faith, her heart, her love for her family, and – everyone knew it – especially her love for her sons. So now it was sadness that was the biggest part of her, and it showed in her slower walk and, as she got closer, in her face. She’d tried putting on lipstick, but it looked as futile as a painted-on smile – too bright and artificial against the pale sorrow of her skin.

‘Ella, honey . . . I’m sorry about Paige. I tried to call you. Did you get my message?’

I shook my head. Elbow was the Bermuda Triangle of cell phone reception.

She took a deep breath. ‘Auntie Sophia had one of her episodes. I didn’t know what to do. Paige offered and I –’

‘It’s okay.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s okay.’

‘She – Paige – seems so different now.’

‘Different how?’

‘So . . . capable. She was whiny. Spoiled. She drove me crazy. She was no mother at all – all she did was whine and complain and mope around. Certainly no wife to Joseph.’

His name came out like a squeak. She said, ‘Oh no. I wasn’t going to do this. I’m sorry, honey. You have your own tears.’

I put my arm around her. ‘You,’ I said, ‘of all people, are entitled to cry. We’re going to get through this. Come on. Let’s eat.’

She patted my hand. ‘You sound so Italian when you say that.’

Marcella had brought minestrone and I made a salad with the lettuce from our garden – one thing I’d picked and managed not to trample into the ground. Joe’s dad came over too, carrying a warm loaf of cheese bread from the bakery in Freestone. When the subject of the store came up, I got busy putting ice in Zach’s soup.

‘One thing about our son,’ Joe said. ‘We were proud of the way he carried on that store. In this day and age, it’s not easy. Those big-box stores. Everybody’s gotta have fifty rolls of toilet paper just because it’s cheaper? Then they gotta build bigger houses to hold all that toilet paper? All those tree huggers living in these parts should know better. They put solar panels on their goddamn mansions.’

‘Joseph. Your grandchildren.’

‘It’s craziness. But Capozzi’s lives on.’ He poured more wine. ‘Not many years after my father opened, we almost lost his store.’ He and Marcella shared a long look. I knew exactly what he was referring to. The unspoken internment camp. ‘But we persevere. I was worried that Joey didn’t have what it takes. When he was younger, always off snapping pictures, head in the clouds.’ He thumped his chest. ‘But he did the right thing. That boy loved my father. He honoured his grandfather’s name. Joey made us proud.’ Marcella dabbed her eyes with her napkin, and Joe Sr changed the subject, asking Annie what she’d done all day.

Annie looked at me before saying, ‘I played with Mama.’

Joe Sr asked, ‘In the garden?’

‘No . . . not
Mommy. Mama.
’

‘Mama, Mommy. What’s the difference.
Mamma mia,
that’s what I say.’

‘No, Grandpa.
This
is Mommy.’ She poked my shoulder. ‘But the other lady is Mama. You know what I mean, silly.’

As much as I loved Marcella’s soups, especially her minestrone, each bite sizzled in my stomach, threatening anarchy. And the bread would not go down. Fear had parked itself in the middle of my digestive system.

Marcella said, ‘Paige came by today, Grandpa.’

‘What the hell for? Oh, for Christ’s sake, that woman, if you can even call her –’

‘Joseph Capozzi. Stop.’

‘Well? That’s what he got for marrying a non-Italian.’

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘I’m not Italian, either.’

‘Honey, the way you cook and garden and heap love on your kids, you’re an honorary Italian. Which is just as good. Almost.’ He tore off his bread and chewed, his eyes on me. He reached out and put his rough, calloused hand gently over mine.

After Joe Sr and Marcella left, I put the kids to bed and told my mom I wanted to check on something at the store. The parking lot was still almost full from the two restaurants in town. I wanted to get into the store without seeing or talking to anyone, so I went around back and climbed the stairs before turning on any lights.

I opened and shut the desk drawers, ran my finger over the carved words on the underside of what had then been his father’s desk, when Joe and David were bored nine- and seven-year-olds, waiting for their father to quit talking to a customer and close the store for the evening. Joe had shown me the carvings with a penlight, laughing as he told the story. He had used his pocketknife – a recently received Christmas present from their parents that David coveted but had been denied due to his younger status. Joe had carved
Joey’s Market.
Two days later, David had got hold of the knife, drawn a line through Joe’s name, and carved
Davy’s.
And so it went, back and forth numerous times, a lopsided column forming, until they got distracted and started fighting about something else. If tenacity had been the indicator of whose market Capozzi’s would become – according to the carvings, at least – the store would have been David’s, the last name without a line carved through it.

At first, going through the books was like trying to read Russian, but eventually the message was clear in any language: The store was in worse trouble than I’d thought. It wasn’t just the
recently
unpaid bills I’d found in the files. How could I not know this? Joe had refinanced and pulled money out right before we got married. The store was in deep, deep trouble. The last few months had been the most brutal. No wonder he hadn’t sent in the application for the new insurance policy.

I knew things had been tough. Joe had discussed some of it with me. But he hadn’t told me the whole story. The store was losing money every day and had been for who knew how long? His parents didn’t know – I was sure of that. But maybe Joe had told his best friend.