The Underside of Joy

but I didn’t ask. And with that, Joe Sr handed back the photo and turned and walked out the door. I understood. I’d grown up in a family that didn’t talk about certain things, and I felt most at home not asking the questions.
    I shuffled through the frames until I came to one, taken later, on the same front porch, with Sergio, Joe Sr, and Joe, as a toddler. Joe’s arms were up, as if he were about to call a touchdown. Both men smiled down at him.
    I forced myself to get up in the morning to do not only the things I needed to do, but also some of the things I loved. I fulfilled my duties at the store and spent time with Annie and Zach. Sometimes, in moments that felt a bit like grace, I combined the two, having them help me with restocking, deciding what picnic spots would be featured on the Life’s a Picnic map, which Clem Silver had agreed to draw; he’d even ventured down to the store for a meeting.
    At the store, I kept pulling out craft projects for the kids, and in between sanding and painting and hammering, I’d sit down to join them. I found an odd satisfaction in making messes and cleaning them up. I tried to keep my mind clear of anything but the task at hand, whether it was mixing shrimp and mango curry salad or deciding on a pattern for a beaded necklace, then following it exactly: two blue wooden beads followed by three green glass beads followed by one silver. No surprises. As predictable as the minutes ticking by. Until the time I pulled too hard and the string broke, scattering beads under the refrigerator case so that I could retrieve only enough to make a bracelet. And I remembered that even time – especially time – was far from predictable.
    We worked in the garden too – harvesting more vegetables than we could ever use. I took bags of artichokes, tomatoes, basil, and more to Marcella and David, who added them to our menu creations.
    I made juice Popsicles for Annie and Zach like my mom had made for me, in her old Tupperware Popsicle mould. I even filled Dixie cups with a Milk-Bone and chicken bouillon and froze them for Callie. I was on top of things in a way I never had been. Certainly, I assured myself, in a way Paige had never been and never could be. I was the poster woman for the perfect widow/mother/store saver/dog lover.
    But then something would remind me that I really wasn’t all that.
    One day I opened the freezer to find Zach’s action figure frozen in a plastic cup of solid ice. Batman lay cold, masked, unmoving, his right arm reaching out for me, urging me to set him free. Zach ran in, sweaty and smudged, asking for apple juice. I held out the human Popsicle, and he said, ‘Mr Freeze zapped him.’ For days, whenever I opened the freezer, I found another victim of Mr Freeze’s in a pie plate or plastic container: Spider-Man, Superman, Robin; apparently even villains like the Joker and Catwoman could not dodge Mr Freeze’s ice machine.
    I left them, but soon there was no room in the freezer. ‘Zach,’ I said. ‘Honey? What do you want to do with all these frozen guys? We don’t have any room.’
    He shrugged. ‘ I can’t do anything. Dr Solar has to rescue them.’
    I asked him when he thought Dr Solar might show up.
    He looked out at the fogless morning. ‘Today probably.’
    Later, as I hung up clothes on the line, admiring how Grandma Rosemary had held it all together with Sergio gone – part of me tempted to pretend Joe was unfairly locked behind a chain-link fence with barbed wire instead of under a headstone – I heard Zach let out a scream that gave me goose bumps, even in the warm sunshine. I ran up to the house. Zach stood on the back porch, face red, tears streaming.
    ‘Look what you made me do!’ he wailed.
    On the porch, in the direct sun, were the seven plastic containers Zach had lined up that morning, action figures floating facedown in the melted ice.
    ‘Now they’ve all DROWNED !’
    ‘Oh, honey . . .’ Why hadn’t I thought this through?
    ‘And they’re DEAD ! And they’re never, ever, ever coming back! Even when I’m a big boy.’
    I wanted to save every one of the masked hard bodies, the Caped Crusader, the Boy Wonder. I dumped out the water, pointed out that they all had superhuman powers, anyway, and could defy their untimely deaths. Zach had spent hours playing with them every day, and I wanted him to keep enjoying them. But he insisted on burying them. He wanted to have a funeral for them. And I didn’t try to fix this