That Old Cape Magic

here. This look like nothin’ to you?”
    Jason didn’t answer immediately, his jaw dropping that same single notch. “No.”
    “Jared.” Joy sighed. “Jason.”
    “It definitely looks like
some
thing,” Jason said, squinting, as if to bring the two of them into clearer focus.
    “Yeah, but what?”
    “Don’t know,” Jason said finally. “Don’t care. You guys seen Dot?”
    “They haven’t,” Jared answered for them.
    “He wants Dot, damn it.”
    “They know that.”
    “Then let’s go find the bitch.”
    When the doorway was empty, Joy let her chin fall to her chest.“Does it make any sense that this whole year, whenever I’ve been with my family,
that’s
when I’ve missed you?”
    “Not really,” he admitted. Why would she miss his snarky, all-too-predictable comments about her loved ones?
    “Brian actually thinks they’re all terrific,” she told him, and for the life of him Griffin couldn’t tell whether this mitigated in the other man’s favor or not. “Last December,” she continued, “that’s when I missed you most.”
    He tried hard to hear in this statement his wife’s undying affection but had to suspect she was trying to express something very different, maybe even the opposite. She was talking about when she’d
needed
him most. When he should have been there and wasn’t. “Back then you mentioned there was some family stuff going on.”
    She nodded, looking down at her lap as if she could see her broken finger through the Johnnie. “It was horrible. Dot found them.”
    Griffin waited for her to continue, not at all sure she would.
    “She was helping Daddy go through some of Mom’s things. Getting annoyed with him because he didn’t want to get rid of anything. Anyway, there was a locked box.”
    “Which she opened.”
    “It held a bundle of letters.” She met Griffin’s eyes now, her own spilling over.
    “An affair?”
    She nodded.
    “And she showed the letters to Harve.”
    “He called me up wanting to know what they meant.” She paused to wipe her eyes. “I told him they didn’t mean anything.”
    “Good for you.”
    “But he knew, Jack. He didn’t want to, but oh, God, he was sobbing. My father. The whole time I was growing up, I never saw him cry. He kept saying ‘Jilly-Billy,’ over and over. ‘Jilly-Billy.’ And itmade me so … angry. I wanted to yell at him to stop, please, please
stop
calling her by that stupid, stupid name. There was my father, calling me up in the middle of the night, brokenhearted, wanting to cry on my shoulder, and all I wanted to do was to scream at him, to tell him whatever Mom did was his fault for being so … for being such a …” She stopped, unable to continue, until finally she said, “I was glad. Glad she found somebody.”
    “And you had an urge to tell him.”
    She shook her head, trying to rid it of the memory. “What kind of person …”
    “Joy. Stop. It was a perfectly natural reaction.”
    “You’ll never guess who saved the day. June. Princess Grace of Morocco. She told him Mom was writing an epistolary novel. That the letters were part of that. Her pistolary book, he calls it.”
    “Ah,” Griffin said, now understanding the reference. “He mentioned it, actually.”
    “You always said we were messed up. All of us.”
    “Not you,” he corrected, but she wasn’t really listening.
    “And now look. We’ve come together here and totaled our daughter’s wedding. The part
we
hadn’t already totaled.”
    “It’s not totaled,” he told her.
    “What would you call it—a fender bender?”
    “Tomorrow will be fine.”
    He said this with as much conviction as he could muster, but of course a more convincing argument to the contrary was his grotesque appearance, which she now seemed to be taking in for the first time. “You know what I’m doing?” she said. “I’m imagining the wedding pictures.”
    “I’ve looked better? Is that what you’re saying?”
    “You look like you’re about to drop.”
    “I am,” he admitted, his limbs suddenly deadweight, his head impossibly heavy on his neck. But he didn’t want this conversation, this time, to end, not just yet.
    “Are you going to get that eye looked at?”
    “No, I just need some sleep. That and a handful of I-be-hurtin’s.” Their joke term for ibuprofen. It had slipped out naturally, unconsciously, like taking her hand earlier in the evening.
    When he rose to leave, Joy said, “I guess I’m trying to say I owe you an