“They haven’t,” Jared answered for them.
“He wants Dot, damn it.”
“They know that.”
“Then let’s go find the bitch.”
When the doorway was empty, Joy let her chin fall to her chest. “Does it make any sense that this whole year, whenever I’ve been with my family, that’s when I’ve missed you?”
“Not really,” he admitted. Why would she miss his snarky, all-too-predictable comments about her loved ones?
“Brian actually thinks they’re all terrific,” she told him, and for the life of him Griffin couldn’t tell whether this mitigated in the other man’s favor or not. “Last December,” she continued, “that’s when I missed you most.”
He tried hard to hear in this statement his wife’s undying affection but had to suspect she was trying to express something very different, maybe even the opposite. She was talking about when she’d needed him most. When he should have been there and wasn’t. “Back then you mentioned there was some family stuff going on.”
She nodded, looking down at her lap as if she could see her broken finger through the Johnnie. “It was horrible. Dot found them.”
Griffin waited for her to continue, not at all sure she would.
“She was helping Daddy go through some of Mom’s things. Getting annoyed with him because he didn’t want to get rid of anything. Anyway, there was a locked box.”
“Which she opened.”
“It held a bundle of letters.” She met Griffin ’s eyes now, her own spilling over.
“An affair?”
She nodded.
“And she showed the letters to Harve.”
“He called me up wanting to know what they meant.” She paused to wipe her eyes. “I told him they didn’t mean anything.”
“Good for you.”
“But he knew, Jack. He didn’t want to, but oh, God, he was sobbing. My father. The whole time I was growing up, I never saw him cry. He kept saying ‘Jilly-Billy,’ over and over. ‘Jilly-Billy.’ And it made me so… angry. I wanted to yell at him to stop, please, please stop calling her by that stupid, stupid name. There was my father, calling me up in the middle of the night, brokenhearted, wanting to cry on my shoulder, and all I wanted to do was to scream at him, to tell him whatever Mom did was his fault for being so… for being such a…” She stopped, unable to continue, until finally she said, “I was glad. Glad she found somebody.”
“And you had an urge to tell him.”
She shook her head, trying to rid it of the memory. “What kind of person…”
“Joy. Stop. It was a perfectly natural reaction.”
“You’ll never guess who saved the day. June. Princess Grace of Morocco. She told him Mom was writing an epistolary novel. That the letters were part of that. Her pistolary book, he calls it.”
“Ah,” Griffin said, now understanding the reference. “He mentioned it, actually.”
“You always said we were messed up. All of us.”
“Not you,” he corrected, but she wasn’t really listening.
“And now look. We’ve come together here and totaled our daughter’s wedding. The part we hadn’t already totaled.”
“It’s not totaled,” he told her.
“What would you call it-a fender bender?”
“Tomorrow will be fine.”
He said this with as much conviction as he could muster, but of course a more convincing argument to the contrary was his grotesque appearance, which she now seemed to be taking in for the first time. “You know what I’m doing?” she said. “I’m imagining the wedding pictures.”
“I’ve looked better? Is that what you’re saying?”
“You look like you’re about to drop.”
“I am,” he admitted, his limbs suddenly deadweight, his head impossibly heavy on his neck. But he didn’t want this conversation, this time, to end, not just yet.
“Are you going to get that eye looked at?”
“No, I just need some sleep. That and a handful of I-be-hurtin’s.” Their joke term for ibuprofen. It had slipped out naturally, unconsciously, like taking her hand earlier in the evening.
When he rose to leave, Joy said, “I guess I’m trying to say I owe you an apology.”
“What on earth for?”
“Your mother,” she said. “I never should’ve let you do that alone. I told myself it was the way you wanted it, that it was just you going back into that room of yours, the one where I’ve never been allowed, and closing the door behind you. I told myself I’d come if you asked, but not until. That was wrong. And, just so you know, you aren’t the only one your daughter’s mad at.”
“I’ll speak to her.”
“There’s no need. She loves us both. I think she tried not to for a while, but it didn’t work.”
“She’s her mother’s daughter.”
“Before you go,” she said, handing him her purse, “open that, will you?” When he did, she fished around with her good hand until she located her keys. “Your father’s urn is on the backseat. Just leave the keys in the cup holder.”
Griffin took them.
When he reached the door, she said, “You wanted to know if Brian makes me happy?”
He wasn’t sure he did, but nodded anyway.
She started to say something, then stopped, and when she finally spoke he had the distinct impression it wasn’t what she’d started to say. “He doesn’t make me unhappy.”
“Well,” he said, his heart sinking, “that’s something, I guess.”
Did she call after him as the door swung shut? He paused in the corridor but heard no further sound from inside the room. In fact, in that instant the whole world was still.
Down the hall Laura and Andy came out of another examination room and told him they didn’t want him driving anywhere, but he said he was fine, just exhausted, and offered to take them back to the Hedges, but Laura said they’d wait for her mother. Outside, he took the urn from Joy’s SUV and left the keys in the cup holder as instructed. After popping the trunk of his rental car, he paused, half expecting his mother to object, but it had been a long day and apparently even ghosts slept, so he slipped his father’s urn into the wheel well opposite hers. Then he got into the car, rolled the window down and just sat there. The magazine with “The Summer of the Brownings” was still on the dashboard. The evening hadn’t provided the right moment to give it to Joy, and he doubted tomorrow would either. He could leave it in her SUV, he supposed, but then decided not to. He was suddenly just too tired to walk back across the hospital lot.
The night air was rich with the sea, and he breathed it in deeply, thinking how good it would feel to fall asleep right here. Again it occurred to him how different Maine was from the Cape. What would’ve happened if he and Joy had honeymooned here, as she’d wanted to, instead of Truro? Would they have drawn up a different accord? He was nodding off when he heard shouts coming from the direction of the hospital. Lord, he thought, what now? But it was just the idiot twins, Jared and Jason, expanding the search for their stepmother. In the voice of the man they still imagined to be their father, they shouted in marine unison, “Dot! Where are you, dot damn it!”
By the time he got back to the B and B, the clock on the nightstand said 12:07. He undressed in the dark, as quietly as possible, and slipped between the sheets in stages so as not to wake the woman who now shared his bed. They’d been together for several months, but it still felt strange-and never more so than tonight-to be with a woman who wasn’t Joy. When she stirred he expected her to ask how things had gone at the rehearsal, if she’d missed anything good, but she didn’t and her breathing quickly became regular again. A minute later he was asleep himself.