The Underside of Joy

drawer and picked out three movies. The Sound of Music, Toy Story, and Beauty and the Beast. I walked to my room and closed the blinds and popped in The Sound of Music DVD. I took off my jeans and pulled on my sweats. The kids stood as if they were in a stranger’s house. Movies were for night; they knew the rules. In the kitchen I made popcorn, then climbed into bed with the bowls. After a few minutes, I patted both sides of the bed. ‘Come on.’ And then I sang, ‘Let’s start at the very beginning . . .’ and they climbed up onto the bed, giggling, plugging their ears. Another family joke Joe had started. Apparently, I didn’t have the world’s best singing voice.
    Zach held Bubby with one hand and took his bowl of popcorn with the other. Callie jumped up and stuck her nose in Annie’s bowl, then lay across the foot of the bed, chomping. We didn’t get up to answer the phone. We didn’t get up to answer the door. ‘Shhhh,’ I said when we heard a knock, and they stifled their giggles in the pillows. Even Callie agreed not to bark. She just whined and thumped her tail against the mattress and cocked her head at us as if to say, You know, it could be him . . .
    With Joe’s picture gazing at us from the nightstand, we watched movies and we slept and we watched more movies. For dinner, I ordered a pizza delivered from Pascal’s and stuck in The Little Mermaid. I almost got up to change it as soon as I remembered that Ariel saved Prince Eric from drowning. But I left it in. It might upset them, but better that it happened when they were with me than somewhere else, like at a friend’s house. Or with Paige.
    The storm came up. I wrapped my arms around each of them as Prince Eric fell to the bottom of the sea. I wondered again what it had been like for Joe. Had it been like Frank had thought, that he’d hit his head right as he was pulled under, that he didn’t even know he would never see us again? I hoped so. I hoped his last frame of reference was the frame through his lens of the rusty ragged sea cliff against deep blue sky, not thoughts of Annie and Zach crying in my arms. When Ariel lifted Prince Eric up, up, up to the surface, and brought him back to life with her beautiful voice, all three of us had tears streaming down our faces. Annie planted her wet cheek into my neck and said, ‘I wish mermaids were real.’
    I said, ‘Yeah, Banannie, me too.’
    Zach said, ‘If I were King Triton, I would have ROARED so that all the fishes and mermaids would lift Daddy back up to the AIR ! I muchly would.’ He laid his head in my lap and I smoothed his hair back. But then Zach started to sob, ‘I want my DADDY ! I want my DADDY !’ and Annie broke down too, yelling even louder than Zach, the same words, over and over.
    I held on tight. I thought of Great-Grandma Just and her two children on that big ship, headed for the great unknown. Eventually Annie’s and Zach’s yells and tears dissipated, their stuttered breaths evened out, and they finally slept, their small faces streaked with trails of dried salt.

Chapter Nine
    The people of Elbow hung up their black clothes one day, and by the next week they were donning red, white, and blue. It was not out of disrespect for Joe, but in many ways in honour of him. In fact, Joe Sr and Marcella upheld their civic duty by being the first to swaddle their porch columns in Fourth of July banners, while the rest of the town soon followed their lead. Elbow does the Fourth of July like New York City does New Year’s Eve. And if we keep that exaggerated analogy going, Joe was our own Dick Clark, and the front porch at Capozzi’s Market was our own little Times Square. The Beach and Boom Barbeque was a forty-three-year tradition begun by Grandpa Sergio after the war, and it wasn’t going to stop now. Yes, the man who had been sent to an internment camp apparently celebrated the Fourth with a vengeance. Joe had told me that it was such a part of their family’s and town’s tradition, he’d never questioned it.
    Lucy found us in the garden. Zach’s superheroes were taking over some long-lost planet from their spaceship Tomato Basket, and Annie had converted Callie into a horse.
    I stretched my back and gave Lucy a hug. ‘Your hair’s warm,’ she said. ‘I thought you guys would be in your costumes by now.’
    I shrugged. ‘It’s too weird. I can’t even picture it without him.’
    ‘I know. You’re going, though, right?’
    I nodded.
    Annie said,