While my mom and I drank coffee by the fire, I asked her in the most casual voice I could muster, So? What did you think of Paige?
She shrugged, somewhat carefully. A bit I dont know Barbie comes to mind, I guess. Or maybe its insecurity. Shes awfully stiff. And her ankles are a bit on the thick side, dont you think? Anyway, shes nothing like you. As only a mother could say.
Insecure? Shes so composed.
My mom made a dismissive wave of her hand, then said, It had to be difficult to show up like that But people need to make themselves feel okay. So I can understand why she came. Lord knows all kinds of people came to your fathers funeral.
She rarely mentioned my dad. Really? Like who?
Oh, you know. I dont remember who, exactly. It was a long time ago, Jelly.
Door closed. I knew better than to press further. But what does Paige want? Im worried about the kids.
Youve been their mother for three years. Everyone knows that. Including Paige. And with Joe gone, youre the one constant parent in their lives.
She could come back.
She sipped her coffee, set down her cup, which read photographers do it in the darkroom. A present Annie had innocently insisted on getting for Joe. I doubt Paige is going to step up now. After three years of doing nothing. And if she did? Like I said, anyone can see youre their real mom. She reached over and grabbed my hand and gave it a long squeeze. She said, Weve got to talk business. I know its the last thing you feel like doing
I dont feel like doing anything.
I know. But I can help you with the paperwork. And Ive only got a few more days. She said we needed to check into the life insurance policy, call Social Security, request the death certificate. She sat up straighter and smoothed her robe over her lap. Jelly, I can make the preliminary calls, but theyre all going to want to talk to you okay?
No. It was not okay. But I nodded anyway.
She patted my knee and stood. It will get your mind off that Paige woman.
Chapter Five
Marcella came by to watch the kids while my mom and I drove into Santa Rosa to take care of the paperwork side of death. I stared out of the car window at people going about their business crossing the street, emerging from buildings, from parked cars, putting change in parking meters, laughing as my mom drove us back towards Elbow, towards the store. I hadnt told her that Joe had an old life insurance policy that we were in the middle of updating. As in the beginning of the middle. As in hed talked to Franks dads insurance guy, but I hadnt heard anything else. I thought the old policy was around $50,000, which would buy me a little time to figure out what to do, but not a lot, and this would worry my mom.
Back in San Diego, Id worked in a lab in what we used to call the cutting foreskin of biotechnology, but I hadnt kept up on it, hadnt wanted to, really, since Id discovered almost my first day on the job that I hated working in a lab. When I was a kid I read Harriet the Spy and felt certain that I wanted to be a spy, or at the least, an investigator. I walked around with my dads birding binoculars bouncing on my chest, a yellow spiral-bound notepad jammed in my back pocket. I spied on the mailman. I spied on the neighbours. I spied on our houseguests. I wrote down descriptions just like my dad did when we went bird-watching. But after my dad died, I lost my curiosity about people. They were too complex to capture in a few hastily scribbled notes, too unpredictable and perplexing in their behaviours. I turned my attention to the plants and animals he had started teaching me about just before he died, and later, I majored in biology. Somehow Id taken a wrong turn and ended up staring at cells under a microscope in that biotech lab instead of tromping through field and lake and wood.
Back in San Diego, Id worked in a lab in what we used to call the cutting foreskin of biotechnology, but I hadnt kept up on it, hadnt wanted to, really, since Id discovered almost my first day on the job that I hated working in a lab. When I was a kid I read Harriet the Spy and felt certain that I wanted to be a spy, or at the least, an investigator. I walked around with my dads birding binoculars bouncing on my chest, a yellow spiral-bound notepad jammed in my back pocket. I spied on the mailman. I spied on the neighbours. I spied on our houseguests. I wrote down descriptions just like my dad did when we went bird-watching. But after my dad died, I lost my curiosity about people. They were too complex to capture in a few hastily scribbled notes, too unpredictable and perplexing in their behaviours. I turned my attention to the plants and animals he had started teaching me about just before he died, and later, I majored in biology. Somehow Id taken a wrong turn and ended up staring at cells under a microscope in that biotech lab instead of tromping through field and lake and wood.
Now I had the guide job for Fish and Wildlife lined up, but it was part-time, not enough for the three of us to live on and keep the store running. The store was Grandpa Sergios, Joe Srs, and Joes legacy.
Sergio had started it as a place where the Italian immigrants could find supplies and keep their heritage alive, fulfil their nostalgic longings for their mother country. But during World War II, some of the Italian men, including Sergio, had been sent to internment camps. When Joe had told me, Id stupidly said, Sergio was Japanese?
Joe laughed. Ah, that would be no.
Ive never heard of any Italian internment. How can that be?
But Joe explained that, yes, some Italians and Germans, too, had been sent away to camps, though in much smaller numbers than the Japanese Americans. And Italians living in coastal towns had to relocate. Many from Bodega came to Elbow. But there was a reason Id never heard about Italian internment: No one ever talked about it. The Italian Americans didnt talk about it, and the U.S. government didnt talk about it.
But it happened, Joe said. Grandpa never liked to discuss it. Same with Pop. But thats why Sergio and Rosemary insisted we call them Grandpa and Grandma instead of Nonno and Nonna. There had been a big push during the war not to speak Italian. Another one of the fallouts was that Capozzis Market lost its Everything Italia motto and became an Americanized hybrid. The mozzarella made room for the Velveeta. I think the store along with Grandpa Sergio kind of lost its passion. He shrugged. He took a long pause before he added, Trying to be what it thought it was supposed to be. Playing it safe. I wondered, the way Joes voice trailed off, if he was talking about himself as much as he was Sergio. But I didnt ask. Part of me didnt want to know.
My mom turned into the parking lot where Joe and I had first met. The wooden screen door slammed behind us when we walked in; the floors creaked hello. Joe was everywhere. Every detail, no matter how mundane, now held significance. The store hybrid as it was had composition, like his photographs. Somehow, and I dont quite know how he did it, the way he arranged everything from the oranges and lemons, the onions and leeks, the Brussels sprouts and artichokes and cabbage in the produce section, to the aisles of canned and boxed goods and even the meat and fish behind the glass case every item complemented another, so that when you opened that ancient screen door, felt the fan whirring up above and smelled the mixture of old wood and fresh vegetables and hot coffee, saw his scrawl on the chalkboard with the days specials, you felt as if you were walking into a photograph of a time when everything was whole and good.
But the store that had been Joe was already fading. His cousin Gina had tried, but her careful handwriting on the chalkboard reminded me of a classroom, not the deli. The produce looked tired. I smelled bleach, not soup. Down one of the aisles, I noticed something that couldnt have just appeared in the past few days: a layer of dust on the soup cans and boxes of pasta.
I hugged Gina, who was as limp as the lettuce, then went upstairs to Joes office. I let my hands linger over his desk before I opened the right-side drawer, pushed back the other files, pulled out the one marked Life Insurance. There it was: $50,000. Marcella and Joe Sr had bought him the policy when he and Paige married, years before the kids were born. We had changed it, naming me as the beneficiary, but increasing the amount became a work in progress. I found the forms from Hank Halstrom Insurance that Joe had started to fill out, but that wave came out of nowhere, and the forms were still here, waiting to be finished, waiting to be sent, waiting for business to pick up, so we could afford the higher payment.
There, on the first page only, was the handwriting that should have been on the chalkboard, the boyish quality of it. I traced the letters with my fingertip. Not long before, hed sat in the same place, hunched over the same forms, just in case someday Had he wondered about his death then? About how? Or when? Or how the three of us would have to find a way to get up the next day without him, and the next?
I pulled a tissue out of my pocket and blotted the tear that had fallen on the form. I was not going to start that again. I held the tissue against my eyes, as if I could push the tears back inside their ducts. In some ways it was harder to be in the store than at home. Had I even set foot in this office before without Joe? He was the last person to sit in this chair, to rest his rough elbows on this desk, to punch our phone number into this phone, to speak into the receiver, to say, Hey, Im heading home. Got the milk and peanut butter. Anything else?
My mom was waiting. I took the insurance file and a thick stack of unopened envelopes that had been shoved in the to-do file.
I hadnt got involved with the bills. Joe had his system in place when I moved in. Besides, I was a mess when it came to paperwork. My mother would tell me this was an opportunity for personal growth. Time to embrace paperwork. Time to stop blubbering and get home to Annie and Zach.
I walked down the stairs, waved, and thanked Gina. She nodded, her eyes still a bit puffy behind her wire-framed glasses. Shed recently returned to Elbow after leaving Our Sisters of Mercy. At age thirty-two, shed realized she didnt want to be a nun and was still reeling from that decision. Joe and I had privately called her his ex-sister cousin.