The Underside of Joy

me started on what makes a real mother. Adequate? And let’s talk about exactly what it was that you were capable of doing, what you did to Annie and Zach, the one thing that no mother in her right mind would do to her children.

    I am asking that they be allowed to live with me in Las Vegas, where I own a beautiful home in a neighbourhood full of young children, and that full custody be granted to me.
    I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.
    A mediation date was set for October 1; an order to show cause hearing, whatever that was, was set for November 3. And a demand for some documents, including the fictitious letters.
    Joe hadn’t let on about just how much the store was struggling. I was shocked by that, but I could almost understand how it might happen; the store was Joe’s business, literally. He’d thought he could turn it around and no one – even me – would have to know how bad things had become. I hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day operations of the store. But the kids – that was different. When it came to Annie and Zach, Joe and I told each other every single thing. We went to their doctor’s appointments together, took Annie to her first day of kindergarten together, shared each of Zach’s new words – including the most colourful. Joe would have told me if Paige had tried to correspond with the kids. And I knew without question that Joe wasn’t cruel.
    I threw the packet as hard as I could, but it wiggled feebly three feet in the air before slumping to the ground.
    I think I slept twenty minutes that night. The next morning, as soon as I got back from taking the kids to school, I called the troops – all of Joe’s family, Lucy, my mom, Frank – and told them Paige had filed for custody. No one let on that they were worried. ‘No judge in his right mind would give custody to that woman,’ Marcella assured me.
    Joe had handled the paperwork for his divorce without a lawyer, but I knew I needed one. Frank recommended someone, and I called her as soon as I hung up. She could squeeze me in during her lunch hour – could I make it? I left the kids with Marcella and made sure David and Gina could cover the store.
    Driving in, I remembered the last time I’d gone to see a lawyer. It was when Henry and I decided to divorce. Henry, who had once, long ago, turned up as my cute lab partner in my Protists as Cells and Organisms class, said my name reminded him of L.L.Bean. He said he could picture me on a page from the catalogue, on the front porch of a cabin in Vermont, wearing a down vest and jeans and fishing boots, living a simple life. A couple of acres, a couple of kids. Sounded like a plan, and I was all for it.
    But after Henry and I married, great jobs in the biotech industry lured us to San Diego and we moved into a peach stucco palace with easy freeway access amid hundreds of other peach stucco palaces. The joke around the Olympic-size pool in our gated community was that the houses stood so close together, when you wanted to borrow a cup of margarita salt, your neighbour could pass it to you through the bathroom windows.
    ‘We can always retire in Montana,’ Henry said. While I floundered, then withered as a research assistant, aching to be wearing that down vest in the woods instead of a white coat in the lab, Henry thrived. He loved his job as a biochemist, loved the vast array of beaches and the non-array of weather, loved the sparsely furnished peach palace and our virgin SUV that never once ventured off the pavement to climb a mountain. It never even hauled kids to soccer games.
    Then came all the miscarriages, all the misery that left us staring at each other on opposite ends of an empty, long dining room table. At Henry’s insistence, we each talked to lawyers. One said to me, ‘At least you don’t have children.’ I stared at her. I watched her flick a pea of lint off the sleeve of her expensive-looking jacket and fold her arms on the desk. ‘You’d be tied to him forever. You’d have to deal with him and then the stepmother, if he should remarry . . . which they always do. Immediately. Men want to be saved from single parenting and women want to save them.’ She raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow, her own Arc de Triomphe. ‘It’s a nightmare. The most you could hope for is someone who tolerates the kids.’ She shrugged. ‘Few people can really love a child the way a natural parent does. Consider yourself