The Underside of Joy

another. These held Annie’s old baby clothes – almost everything tiny and pink or peach and white, little cotton mementos of an era I could never be part of. There was even a onesie with little ducks that I recognized. I’d bought the same one at GapKids during my first pregnancy. I’d left it hanging in the nursery closet when I left Henry. Where was it now? Had he packed it away in a box of other things I’d left behind? More likely, he had given it away.
    Paige and I were both pregnant at the same time. When I’d first met them, I figured out that one of my babies would be the same age as Annie, almost exactly. I found Annie’s baby book, which I had never seen, though that was one of the few things I’d asked Joe about. He’d shrugged and said he wasn’t sure where it was. Did Paige stick it in this box, planning to retrieve it someday? It was homemade, covered in pink and white bunny fabric, with her name, Annie Rose Capozzi, and the date of her birth, November 7, 1992, cross-stitched in the centre. I thought about not opening it – for about two seconds. I knew nothing in it would make me feel better. But I looked anyway, at the photos of Paige, glowing even in labour, and Joe and Paige and Annie snuggled in a hospital bed, surrounded by pink bouquets and balloons, Joe’s and Paige’s smiles equally big, connecting them to their child like the two symmetrical sides of an anchor.
    I flipped through more pages of Annie, and Annie with Marcella, with Joe Sr with Frank and Lizzie and David, but no pictures of Paige, not until Easter, five months later, where she resumed her place again, resurrected from oblivion. There weren’t many pictures of Joe, since he was the one who’d taken most of them. Maybe that was worse, because these photos reflected what he saw, what he loved – his presence in them stronger than if he’d been standing in the middle of each one. The look on Paige’s face, that type of secret smile shared with only one other person on the planet. And Annie in her arms.
    Later that night, I sat in bed trying to pay too many of our household bills without enough bank balance. Mostly, I was waiting for Annie and Zach to call me. Callie lay at the end of the mattress, snoring, jerking her legs as she dug up dream gophers. I tried to sort all my mind’s spinning into some sort of logical sequence, but to no avail. I pulled out the nightstand drawer and rummaged through it until I found my scratch pad and pen. In my handwriting were the words chicken feed and rhubarb seeds.
    Yes, it was true. La-tee-da. My life had once seemed that simple, like the title of a silly song, the kind you’d sing on road trips: ‘Oh, I’ve got chicken feed, and rhubarb seeds, and a smile that’s a mile long. I’ve got a boy and a girl and a husband that’s a pearl, and a smile that’s a mile long.’
    Joe took care of the groceries, filling bags of whatever we needed at the end of the day. The post office was next to the store, so he always picked up the mail. And when the store was slow, he did the books. Apparently, he’d had a lot of time to do the books.
    I’d stepped into his life and had imposed little of my own onto his. I’d felt like a walking tomb that had been overly excavated, ready to collapse in on itself; there hadn’t been any life left in me then. Stumbling into Joe and the kids – a ready-made family with a mommy-size gaping hole for me to fill. I hadn’t questioned any of it. Why question what’s so clearly destiny?
    Joe and I went from not knowing each other’s names one day to raising a family the next. We never went through the phases our friends did – the long, drawn-out exhales and rolled eyes, the ‘I’ll do it, then.’ I eagerly jumped first when it came to the kids. And after months of going it alone, Joe usually let me.
    We’d been together three years. But how well had we really known each other? Perhaps not as well as I’d assumed. Henry and I were married seven years, but even after all we’d gone through together, I never felt I was privy to a different Henry than the one others knew. The conversations he had with me could have easily been had with his colleagues at work, his baseball buddies, or his mother – depending on the topic. Nothing was reserved for only us, except when it came to trying to have a baby. But when we decided we were done trying, and I wanted to talk about adoption, Henry changed the subject. We were back to brief discussions