The Underside of Joy

indulging us with their generosity, dropping apples and pears and apricots by the bucketfuls, more than we could ever eat, as if they were saying, Mangia! Mangia!
    By the time my mom woke up and joined me with her coffee, I felt somewhat better from my group-therapy session with the trees. I wasn’t as worried about starving, anyway.
    ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘I conked out. I didn’t even hear you come in last night.’ She took a sip from her cup. ‘Jelly Bean.’ She leaned over and moved a strand of my hair off my face. ‘We need to talk. I have to head back tomorrow, and we haven’t really had a chance to talk about the insurance and your whole financial picture. I can help you figure it out, but they need me back at the centre the day after tomorrow.’
    I didn’t tell her that although she had slept, I hadn’t, and I was in no shape to discuss what I’d discovered. I hadn’t even begun to wrap my mind around the whole situation. And as stoic as she could be about some things, like the time Zach wiped the contents of his diaper all over the crib, systematically covering each wooden slat with baby poop, this little financial dilemma would positively and completely freak her out. My mom worked as a bookkeeper for a nonprofit. She didn’t make a lot of money, but she lived simply and, with the help of my dad’s life insurance, had managed to never go broke. And so I said, ‘It’s all fine. I just need to talk to an accountant in the next few weeks.’
    She looked at me, sipped her coffee, kept assessing me. ‘You’re exhausted. Are you sleeping?’
    I shrugged, teeter-tottered my hand.
    ‘Why don’t you try to rest today, then, and I’ll take the kids and go do something. We’ll go to Great America or someplace that will exhaust them, and then everyone will be in the same boat.’
    I was tired. But the kids needed me and I needed them. Their birth mother had begun circling and I didn’t know if she was looking for a place to land, or preying, ready to snatch up Annie and Zach, or at best, keeping a distant watch on the nest she’d abandoned years before.
    ‘Let’s all go. I want to hang out with you guys.’
    ‘You’re going to have plenty of time with Annie and Zach, honey. Puh-lenty. And I’ll be back as soon as I can. You need to take care of yourself.’
    ‘I need to be a mom. I can rally. Let me have another three cups of coffee and a shower and I’m there.’
    When I came back out, my mom was looking through one of our photo albums, shaking her head. ‘You guys really perfected the art of the picnic, didn’t you?’
    I sat on the arm of the sofa. The only time the kids ever went to theme parks was when grandparents were involved. Joe and I avoided them. But we went on picnics whenever we could. It was something all four of us loved equally, but for different reasons. Joe liked to pursue his photography and still spend time with his family. I was enthralled with all the redwood-lined hiking trails, the abundance of animal and plant life. The kids loved to catch bugs and see if I could name them. Annie kept a little bug, flower, and bird book in which she painstakingly printed each letter I spelled out to her.
    And of course, we all loved to eat. These were not your basic PBJ types of picnics. We made salads and spreads using whatever we could from our garden’s stash, and I discovered an untapped joy of cooking. We had two kids who would eat anything, so I kept trying new ideas and we’d lie back in the sun and groan at how good everything tasted.
    ‘Honey, would you rather go on a picnic today? It might be easier. We have all that food.’
    I shook my head. Going on a picnic without Joe right then would feel like taking a dull knife and cutting a hole through the centre of me . . . and it wouldn’t feel any better for Annie and Zach. ‘No. Great America it is! Land of the expensive! Home of the brave moms and grandmas! Let’s do it.’
    After that day, whenever my mother and I referred to Great America, we called it Ghastly America – and it wasn’t a political statement. It had to do with my lack of sleep and my dead husband and the ninety-five-plus-degree weather and the kids amped up on too much cotton candy and ice cream sandwiches. It had to do with me getting my period, and my body using the occasion to purge my emotions – which suddenly included being extremely pissed off. The heat baked everything, so the only ride that sounded good was the roller coaster called