The Underside of Joy

the remaining yellowed teeth, the empty, dusty dryness of it.
    ‘Oh God,’ David said after a minute. ‘That could be Max.’
    ‘Max . . .?’
    ‘Joe’s dog when we were kids.’ David nodded, then shook his head. ‘Grandpa Sergio buried him in the redwood grove when I was about nine. You should have seen him in his glory days. A huge golden retriever. Max owned Elbow. He’d walk down the street from house to house. Everyone knew him. He was like the town mascot. I thought he’d live forever. Poor Max.’ David fell silent, his mind turning over memories.
    ‘What happened to him?’
    ‘Oh, that’s a sad story. Joe never told –’ He stopped himself.
    ‘Nope. Add it to the list, I guess.’
    He nodded. ‘I’ll tell you. But not right now. You’ve got some miles to cover.’
    The breeze kicked up and we both stood there, staring at the skull, taking in the warm sun, the stirring air that carried the scent of the bay trees and rosemary bushes, the Douglas fir from the ridge.
    ‘Come here.’ He wrapped me in one of his real hugs. ‘Things will be better again. Just hang in there. We’ll be here waiting. I’ll be here, you know, trying to figure out what else wasn’t said at dinner all those years. How much of the stifling in that room was about me being gay, and how much was really about Grandpa Sergio and Grandpa Dante . . . Internment camps. Shit. I feel another identity crisis coming on . . . You better go, before I climb in with you.’
    On my way out of Elbow, I turned and headed up to the cemetery. I reached back and pulled up the bunch of cornflowers and let Callie scramble out, though I kept an eye on her. I certainly didn’t want her digging there. She circled around tombstones and started to squat by one, but I shooed her over to the trees. ‘Callie! Have you no respect?’ I laid the flowers along Joe’s tombstone, and I whispered, ‘Remember these? I had some just like them in my car when we met? Centaurea cyanus. I brought them into your kitchen and you filled a vase with water? Remember?’ I knelt there, sitting back on my heels, waiting to feel him. Wherever he was, he wasn’t hanging out there. ‘The truth is, I still can’t believe it,’ I said. ‘There’s a part of me that keeps thinking you’ll show up somewhere. Isn’t that weird?
    ‘There’s so much I didn’t know about you, honey. I’m sorry. I wish we could talk . . . I’m going to try to fix things. To fix the mess we made for Annie and Zach.’ I traced the letters on the stone. Joseph Anthony Capozzi Junior. The same letters he said were spelled in freckles on my arm. ‘I love you, honey. I was mad about some things. But I love you. And I’m going to bring them back.’ I took two of the cornflowers back to the Jeep with me and stuck them in the visor. Callie sniffed them. ‘Please Don’t Eat the Cornflowers,’ I said. And she didn’t touch them again, not the whole way to Las Vegas.
    I drove and I drove, and I thought about those cornflowers. After I’d had my fifth miscarriage, my doctor had suggested walking. It didn’t help much. But I walked, anyway. Henry and I had agreed to divorce. I hadn’t known what to do next, where to go, who to be. And so I walked.
    One day, as I passed the massive flower fields in Encinitas, I noticed a migrant worker who had stopped cutting. He was watching me. He ventured out to the edge, close to the sidewalk, ahead of me. When I approached, he said, ‘Wait, miss,’ and bent down, then stood back up, holding an armful of blue flowers. He pushed them towards me and smiled. ‘For you, you take.’ I stopped, my mouth gaping. ‘No, I . . .’
    ‘ Por favor. Every day, you’re sad. Triste. Beautiful flowers, sí ? Esperanza. How you say in English? Hope? They mean this hope.’
    I took the flowers. They filled my arms like a child. I couldn’t help but smile. The next day all the migrant workers, including my friend, were gone. North, I imagined. And suddenly, I wanted to be with them, losing myself in fields of flowers by day, chatting around a camp-fire by night, always moving. A hard life, but one with camaraderie. That’s when I started packing my Jeep. I wasn’t really going to track down the sweet migrant worker, the only person who had instinctively known how to ease my sorrow. But I’d taken it as a sign, the way desperate people do, to do something. To head north, to find my true north. Maybe a job tracking juvenile salmon in Alaska.