Bücher online kostenlos Kostenlos Online Lesen
The Underside of Joy

The Underside of Joy

Titel: The Underside of Joy Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Sere Prince Halverson
Vom Netzwerk:
angry. So I’m buying time. And it helps my psyche, just knowing I’m within fourteen minutes of Annie and Zach.’
    David said to take my time, that he’d figured it would take a while. I asked about Marcella and Joe Sr, but he just said, ‘Oh, you know . . . waiting.’
    I missed them. I missed their oversize dinners and long hugs, Marcella’s loud singing and Joe Sr’s loud swearing, the way their faces opened when the kids walked into the room.
    And I missed Elbow. The wild turkeys would be gobbling into town. It wasn’t unusual to see one sitting on the rooftop of the car in the morning, or to see them flaunting themselves down the middle of the street, the males spreading their huge fantails, prouder even than peacocks. I used to ask them, ‘Guys? Isn’t this the time of year when you should be, you know, hiding?’
    I missed the kids most of all. On Thanksgiving, I called my mom, but she had a houseful of people, her ‘homeless waif‘ dinners she always held, inviting all the people she knew that didn’t have family living in the area. She’d offered to come down or for me to fly up, but I’d declined. Part of me, a ridiculously optimistic part of me, had hoped that somehow Paige would call, or at least would pick up when I called, that she’d see the light and invite me over.
    Callie and I took a walk and ended up at the grocery store, where I bought a single serving of turkey in a plastic container, a single serving of mashed potatoes and gravy, single servings of stuffing and cranberries. I could not shake the feeling of despair. It was Thanks-giving and Paige hadn’t answered her phone. I had not talked to Annie and Zach since they’d left Elbow.
    At the apartment, I called David, and he’d had a bad day too, a fight with Gil, a depressingly quiet dinner, with too many empty chairs around the Capozzi table, too many leftovers.
    ‘Basically,’ he said, ‘I’m lower than whale shit.’
    ‘Oh dear. Then I guess we can pick up where we left off last time – you were saying something about your rampant feelings of rejection?’
    ‘Wow. You’ve got a light touch.’
    ‘I’m sorry, David. But would you . . . do you feel like talking about what happened?’ I actually had my yellow notebook open, ready to take notes. I was getting rather obnoxious.
    ‘No. But I will. If you think it will help your cause.’
    I told him I had multiple causes at the moment, but one of them was to better understand his older brother, especially if it would help me communicate with his ex-wife so I could see Annie and Zach, which was my number one cause.
    David said, ‘Okay. It all happened at Grandpa Sergio’s, so that would be in your house, in your bedroom. The curtains were drawn, they were heavy, and olive green, so it was dim and stuffy, and godawful warm. Grandpa Sergio was in bed, and I was sitting in a chair next to him, holding his hand. He and I? We were really close. I loved that man. I was nineteen.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘My dad was there too. But Grandpa kept asking for Joe Jr. Joe was hurrying back from the university, trying to get there, and Grandpa was trying to hang on. In my mind, I was always Grandpa’s favourite, but he wasn’t so interested in talking to me at the moment.’
    ‘So what happened?’
    ‘So Joe finally arrived. And Grandpa told us everything. All the stuff he’d never talked about came barrelling out, about how he was afraid he might never see his wife and kids again when they took him away. How he and Grandma Rosemary didn’t have a stitch of savings, and the town pulled together to help Grandma and the store. He said, and I’ll never forget this, “The internment, it was based on fear. Fear of a person’s origins. Fear of the mother country. They ask me, who do you love more? Italy or America? I say, ask me who I love more, my mother or my wife? I love them both, but differently. One is my past and one is my future. I say, I love this country, it is my future. But do I worry about my new country bombing my relatives? I do worry, I told them. But that, it didn’t go over so well.”
    ‘Grandpa told us how much he loved both of us. But he said he built his home and his store for his family and its future generations. He said we owed it to Elbow to keep it going. Capozzi’s Market, he said, was this town’s symbol of hope for withstanding the hardest of times.’
    ‘But I still don’t understand why he handed it down to Joe.’
    ‘I’m getting

Weitere Kostenlose Bücher