The Underside of Joy

for him, because I couldn’t fix the rest.
    So I held him while he sobbed, and I helped him bury the plastic bodies out behind the chicken coop. Zach never asked me again when Daddy was coming back.
    He began to understand, bit by bit, then more and more, the difference between Joe’s death and Paige’s departure, and life’s never-ending track of good-byes.

Chapter Thirteen
    By mid-September, the kids had started school, and we were ready to reopen the store.
    We kept the old capozzi’s market sign and, just under it, hung the new sign, life’s a picnic. There was still plenty of picnic weather during the Indian summer, and then the mostly pleasant fall days before the rains set in. But even in the winter, there would be plenty of sunshine between storms that would be perfect for picnickers. The greenhouse addition would provide a backup spot for when the rainstorms came in the deep of winter, and we also set round café tables and chairs on the covered front porch and in one corner of the store, near the woodstove.
    Most of the aisles were gone. The deli counter ran along one entire wall. We’d stocked it with an abundance of cold salads – everything from curry chicken to eggplant pasta, and of course Elbow’s famous elbow macaroni salad, which was your basic macaroni salad with salami thrown in, but we called it famous because of the Elbow connection. We offered sandwiches of every kind imaginable, including our Stuffed Special, made from hollowed-out bread rounds and filled with layers of meats, cheeses, vegetables, and pesto. Everything was made from scratch with fresh ingredients, locally grown whenever possible, grass-fed beef, free-range chickens, no hormone additives, and a whole lot of organic. I knew enough about biology and growing vegetables that I had become a pesticide paranoid, and I wanted to make sure that I was nourishing our customers, not slowly poisoning them. Yes, it was more expensive to use top-quality ingredients, and yes, our prices reflected that, but my gut – which happened to be fairly healthy, as far as I knew – was telling me people were ready for Life’s a Picnic.
    In the centre of the store, Peruvian and Guatemalan picnic baskets of different shapes and sizes were on display. Blankets and tablecloths hung from hooks down the sides. Retro board games of all kinds – Sorry!, Scrabble, checkers, and more – were set out to play; new ones were available to buy. There were four half aisles between the eating area and the deli counter, stocked with wines, crackers, and speciality food items. Behind those were the glass-doored refrigerator cases, stocked with beer, soft drinks, juices, and twelve different kinds of water. Bottled Cokes cooled on ice in the newly restored old-fashioned Coke machine, which I’d unburied from a corner of Marcella and Joe Sr’s barn. Joe had always intended to restore it and use it at the market but hadn’t got around to it. With my new appreciation for not putting things off until ‘someday’, I’d called a place in Santa Rosa called Retro Refresh.
    We’d painted the walls a pale goldenrod that took three tries to get right, but as I stood in the middle of the store the day before we opened, the sun-washed plaster was warm and cheerful and actually made me smile. I stood in the middle of it all, aware that the corners of my mouth both turned up; there I was, a smiling fool of a woman about to open a store called Life’s a Picnic only a few months after her husband had died. Life’s a trip was more like it.
    We’d sent out press releases to every publication and radio and even TV station within California. Just in case, David had said, it was the slowest news day in history and someone wanted to do a story on us.
    The only thing missing was the map of the picnic sites. Clem Silver, who was a nationally recognized illustrator and painter, had said he’d have it ready, but we were opening in less than twenty-four hours, and no one had heard from Clem. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Clem never answered his phone. When I’d questioned him on that one, he’d said, ‘What kind of town recluse answers his phone?’ He had a point. Clem was known to keep to himself. He lived up in the forest, in the dark shade of the redwoods. He had long white hair he wore in a ponytail, he had long fingernails stained with paint, and he smoked long ladies’ cigarettes – Virginia Slims menthol. Apparently, he also took a long time