That Old Cape Magic

it’s Poppa Jarve’s turn—”
    “You
promised
you weren’t going to do that anymore,” Joy said, still gazing off into the distance. Griffin had recently taken to calling him (never to his face) not Harve but Jarve, so he wouldn’t be the only one in the family whose name didn’t begin with a
J
. Joy had found that funny at first but quickly changed her mind, claiming it was mean-spirited.
    “And we have to go through the whole thing all over again.”
    “Who has to?”
    “Because to
Harve
, what you and I do for a living isn’t real work.”
    “He does have a point,” Tommy said, raising his margarita so they could clink glasses.
    “But we stand firm and—”
    Tommy and Joy, together, this time.
“Who
stands firm?”
    “So now, because we can’t go to Sacramento, everybody’s feelings are hurt.”
    “We could’ve gone,” Joy corrected. “We chose not to.”
    “But that’s my point,” Griffin said. “We’re adults. Shouldn’t we be
able
to choose? Every night this week you’ve been on the phone apologizing. First to your father, then your mother, then your sisters, then your father again.” He turned his attention back to Tommy now. “This is why our ancestors came to America. To ditch their symbolic parents. To become grown-ups in their own right.”
    “I’m not saying we’d start some heavy relationship, my mother and I,” Tommy tried to explain. “I’d just like to know if she’s alive or dead … if she’s, you know, okay.”
    “Isn’t that
her
job?” Griffin said, getting worked up on his friend’s behalf. “To wonder if
you’re
okay?”
    Now Tommy appealed to Joy. “Do you ever win an argument with this guy?”
    “Let… me …think,” Joy said, leaning toward Tommy so he could rub her neck, pausing just a comic half beat before saying, as if it had never occurred to her before, “Why, no.”
    Later that same night, though, when he and Joy were in bed, the discussion had turned more serious. “Why shouldn’t he yearn for his biological mother?”
    Okay, Griffin conceded, it made perfect sense that he should. But what made such yearning possible was that he didn’t know the woman. He expected Joy to object to his cynicism, but instead she snuggled up against him and said, “We hurt their feelings, my parents’. That’s why I apologized.”
    Who said she never won any arguments?
    Another buzz, another minute.
    Joy had known about Tommy’s crush on her, of course. How could she not? She just hadn’t expected ever to feel the same way about him, she told Griffin. One day she just woke up and realized she did. But
what
day? When?
    After Laura, was Griffin’s best guess. It was the birth of their daughter, together with Tommy’s divorce, that really changed the dynamic of their lives. It was then that he’d finally given in and accepted Harve and Jill’s offer of a loan. Which guaranteed, Griffin complained to Tommy, that he and Joy were now officially hitched to the parental sled. They’d have little choice but to obey every summons to Sacramento. Tommy took Joy’s side, of course. What could be more natural than for her to want their daughter to know her grandparents, her aunts and uncles and cousins? She simply wanted Laura to grow up with the kind of family memories she herself cherished. Who wouldn’t? (Griffin, for one, but he understood his orphan friend’s question to be rhetorical.) Tommy, who desperately wanted a family, and Joy, who had one—they’d madean effective tag team. “Look,” she said, “we’re talking about a weekend every other month. I’m no fonder of their gated community than you are, but taking their money doesn’t mean we have to start voting Republican or something. Sacramento’s purely logistical. Where else is the family supposed to gather if not at my parents’? Our apartment?” Plus, she went on, the timing was right. Vietnam had been over for years. They were in their late twenties now, and it was time to start applying a salve to all those never-trust-anyone-over-thirty generational wounds.
    “Hey, talk to your old man,” Griffin said, because it was Harve who always brought up the war, Harve who stubbornly refused to admit it had been a mistake, Harve who loved to pronounce that the domino theory “had never been disproved,” as if the war’s detractors had failed at this, too. Besides, he thought but didn’t say, no such reconciliation was needed where
his
parents were concerned. As old-school