The Underside of Joy

cell phone, blotting the black rivers on my face with balled-up tissue. Gwen assured me I was not the first person to insult the opposing party in mediation. ‘Mediators are used to it. They hear it every day.’
    ‘But you said –’
    ‘That was the ideal. It would have been great if you could have stayed on course one hundred percent, but it sounds like you didn’t do as badly as you’re thinking.’
    ‘No. I did. I was terrible. I wouldn’t grant custody to me.’
    ‘Look. Go home. Be with your kids. Make that store a success. We won’t know anything for a week or two. Try not to think about it.’
    But I thought about it, and thought about it. I thought about the fact that Joe had told Paige, or Paige had instinctively known the way wives do, that the store was struggling. I thought about how Paige had said she’d requested to see the kids. ‘Where the hell were you?’ she’d asked. I wondered about that, at least regarding the store. I was sure she was lying about the letters. I would have seen them, would have heard snippets of phone conversations, some thing. Joe wouldn’t have been able to hide that too.
    I hadn’t been much of a praying woman, but I prayed, and prayed, and prayed. Please, somehow, make Janice Conner see that the kids should be with me. Please, please don’t take them away. And if Paige lost her marbles again? That wouldn’t be entirely a bad thing . . . I knew that praying for someone to go crazy couldn’t be winning me any heavenly points, or karmic points, or points on my own side of mental health, but I felt desperate. I cringed whenever I thought of the mediation, of my own stabs at Paige and my incompetent explanation of my ‘bad days’. Of Paige’s words, ‘Instead, he met her.’ Instead of what? Reconciliation? A different ending? A change from the direction that ultimately led to Joe’s death?
    If it wasn’t for all the activity at the store, I would have been the one losing my marbles. Things were busy, and I needed to be there, helping David and Marcella. David managed to get more write-ups in the Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Bohemian, which all raved about the food and the off-the-beaten-track picnic map (one reporter called it worthy of framing and hanging in your home – or the Metropolitan, which made Clem chuckle in delight). The reporters appreciated the whole concept of the store. ‘They have even included a quaint glassed-in back porch amidst the trees, for those days when the weather doesn’t cooperate.’ Joe Sr read from one of the folded papers, then waved all the reviews at me. ‘This idea of yours . . . Hot damn! It might just work.’
    It was the week before Halloween, which couldn’t have been a better time for me to focus on other things besides mediation and the upcoming custody hearing and Paige. I loved Halloween. Elbow was the perfect place for it. No need to haul the kids to a mall for ‘safe’ trick-or-treating. Everyone in Elbow knew one another, we were short on traffic and long on kids, and Life’s a Picnic stood right in the centre of it all. I had big plans.
    I’d made the kids’ costumes every year since I’d been there, and this year would be no different. Yes, there was the gentle tug at the corner of all those big plans, reminding me that next year might be starkly different. And all the years after that. But I tugged back hard and set to work.
    ‘Mommy, what are you up to?’ Annie asked. ‘Besides five foot ten, that is.’ She cracked herself up.
    I burrowed in the back of our closet like one of the gophers Callie kept digging up. I still hadn’t moved out Joe’s clothes. It was one of those things I kept writing down on my lists but never crossing off. ‘I’m looking for the . . . here it is.’ I yanked and pulled out my heavy plastic Singer sewing machine case. ‘Ta-da! It’s that time of year.’
    Annie looked at her foot, twisting her toe into the rug. ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.’
    ‘What about, Banannie?’ Last year she’d been a tree. She wore brown cord pants and, on her torso, over a brown long-sleeve shirt, a big green pillowcase that I’d hot glue gunned with a ton of silk green leaves and stuffed with newspapers. We rigged up a little tree swing with rope and a small board, hung it from her arm, and stuck a stuffed bear on it. On her head, she wore a cap that we topped with a little bird’s nest and a fake robin. Joe had even put a couple