From somewhere down the hall Harve, who’d apparently gotten his voice back, bellowed “No!” and a moment later, “No, goddammit!” as if he’d somehow been privy to his son-in-law’s confession and felt compelled, like a Greek chorus, to register strenuous objection. Griffin found himself smiling weakly, grateful for even the appearance of someone being on his side.
“In fact, it’s not that crazy,” Joy said.
“You think?” he said, genuinely surprised. He’d been willing, as an exercise in self-pity, to take full responsibility for the evening’s events, but he certainly hadn’t expected his wife to agree with him.
“Where’s Dot?” Harve shouted. “Where is she?”
“Our fault, I meant,” his wife clarified. “It wasn’t just you.”
“Well,” he said, “I guess it doesn’t do much good to say I’m sorry, but I am. And…” He paused, not sure he could say the next part, though simple justice demanded it be said.
“And?”
“And if this Brian Fynch makes you happy-”
“No!” Harve bellowed again, refusing to countenance any such suggestion. “I want Dot, damn it!”
Dot damn it?
Griffin looked over at Joy and saw that she, too, was on the verge of cracking up, and his heart leapt in recognition of the old mischievousness he’d so loved about her back when they were first married, all but extinguished now so many long years later. Could he himself be the one who’d put it out?
“Either of you seen Dot?” said a voice, startling both of them. Jared’s shaved head was framed in the doorway.
They told him they hadn’t.
“He wants Dot, damn it!” he said, his mimicry spot-on, as always. “So what’s this about, then?” Meaning, presumably, their being so intimately sequestered.
“Nothing,” they said in unison.
He nodded, registering their denial, but continued to study them curiously, his mouth open one notch on its hinge. It occurred to Griffin that as a military cop he had to ask people all sorts of questions-How much have you had to drink tonight? You the one that gave this young lady the shiner?-and this was the look he gave people he suspected weren’t being entirely candid in their responses. “Jason,” he called over his shoulder, and then there were two heads framed in the doorway, or rather the same head twice, the second stubbled. “They say there’s nothin’ going on in here. This look like nothin’ to you?”
Jason didn’t answer immediately, his jaw dropping that same single notch. “No.”
“Jared.” Joy sighed. “Jason.”
“It definitely looks like something,” Jason said, squinting, as if to bring the two of them into clearer focus.
“Yeah, but what?”
“Don’t know,” Jason said finally. “Don’t care. You guys seen Dot?”
“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?”