The Underside of Joy

the beets from the garden simmered, bobbing in their ruby liquid. Joe walked in with an axe.
    ‘Joe. What are you doing?’
    ‘Take the kids outside to play. We all need light. We need space. We need air. ’
    ‘Are you okay?’ He didn’t look like a man who had simply decided to start a home-remodelling project. He smiled, but his lip was twitching. His eyes shone, daring me. For a second, a cold fear passed through my body – we had only been together a month or so, and I thought, Okay, this is where my loving guy turns out to be an axe murderer. But I saw a tear slip from his eye, a tender vulnerability cross his face. He took the axe to the wall like he was hitting a baseball. It tore through the plaster with a sullen crack.
    ‘Daddy!’ Annie called from the hallway.
    ‘Take the kids outside. Please?’ And then he swung again, breaking through to the other side, yellow swells of sun already seeping through.
    When, two hours later, we returned from our walk to the school playground, Joe was sweeping up the debris in the new dappled light. He kissed me, kissed Zach in the backpack, picked up Annie, who exclaimed, ‘Wowee!’
    ‘Welcome,’ Joe said, ‘to our official Not-So-Great Room.’ I said, ‘But it is great.’
    ‘I don’t know why I never thought to do this. I should have done it a long time ago.’
    Now I understood why that particular day, he did think to do it. He’d received Paige’s letter about the kitchen. The only letter he’d opened after I’d come into the picture. It was another letter instructing him to never call again. But was his motivation in tearing down the wall to bring Paige back? Or to make sure our life together never became what theirs had become?
    Our walls were different, but we had them. Invisible walls. The illusion of light and space and even air. The kind you can’t see, that are fragile as glass. They work great until an unseen force pushes you into one and the illusion shatters, so that every step you take cuts you, cuts those who walk alongside you.
    I opened the door to Annie and Zach’s room, and the kittens scrambled towards me. ‘Close the door or you’ll let them out,’ Annie said.
    ‘Him is mine,’ Zach said, grabbing and holding up a kitten.
    ‘No, Zachosaurus. Remember? They’re both both of ours.’ Even this sounded to me like a custody battle.
    Annie explained that they had finally decided on names, Thing One and Thing Two. They just couldn’t agree on which was which.
    I made coffee in what had once been Paige’s coffee maker. I stirred in milk with one of the spoons from her bridal-registry flatware and put the milk back in the same refrigerator on which she had once kept her family photos with magnets. I thought of that family photo she’d sent with her face cut out, and the words she wrote, I’ve cut my face out. Maybe you can glue in her face. I had walked in and slipped between their sheets. Hell, the very sheets she’d washed and folded and set in the linen closet before she walked out.
    I didn’t think she would be a better mother to them than I was. But probably not a worse one, either. She had been hurt by her mother, she had been ill, apparently something was horribly wrong with her back, but none of that meant she wouldn’t be a good mother. And yet she hadn’t been completely honest in the mediation, hadn’t told Janice Conner that the first five letters she wrote to Joe told him she was never coming back, that he must never contact her. That’s when I stepped in. And then she had got help. She had eventually even got well.
    I checked on the kids, still playing hide-and-seek with the kittens. I walked out to the garden and admired its rows set in a quilt-like pattern, the abundant order of it. This was mine. This was what I brought to the picture. The only thing.
    I looked back at the house. Joe and I had called its quirkiness Funk Factor. I loved it the first time I stepped inside it, and still did. The slightly sunken imperfection of it, the porch that wrapped around it like a hug. It was no longer Paige’s house. In fact, it had never been the kind of home to her that it had been to me and was to me still. A set of flatware, some dishes and appliances, washed linens? So what. Joe and I and the kids had been happy here. Despite all the sadness she’d left in her wake.
    How had it all fit me so perfectly? I had lived in a house in San Diego for years, had picked out every dish, every rug, and never felt at