The Secret of Joy (30 page)

“He’s part of it,” she said. “But I felt this way before we became involved.”

“I’m sick of talking about this,” he said. “Nothing changes. Am I supposed to give you an ultimatum? You’ll just choose to stay there and give me the same answer, that you’re not ready to come home. I’m not going to be here indefinitely, Rebecca. I’m sure you’re aware of that. So let’s just hang up. There’ll come a point when this will be intolerable to me.”
Click
.

She put the phone back on her bedside table, and opened the drawer where she’d put the photo of herself and Michael. Why wasn’t she ready to let go of him? If her father was still alive, she’d still be living with Michael, still be working at
Whitman, Goldberg & Whitman. Still be living the same old life. And if her father had died without telling her about Joy, it would be the same still.

Why was
knowing
the difference?

Maggie’s words came back to her:
“He was telling you he wasn’t leaving you all alone in the world, that you didn’t have to marry Michael.”

He was telling her she had family out there, that if Michael wasn’t really family, if he didn’t feel like family, she could go find family somewhere else. And she had.

sixteen

The next morning, Rebecca sat under a tree in the little park near the center of town, the brilliant red of the leaves reminding her just how long she’d been here. Long enough to send Michael to his gym rat.

As if she were any different. She’d developed a crush on Theo from the moment she saw him.

Rebecca leaned her back up against the tree and stared up at the cottony white clouds moving through the bright blue sky.

“Hey.”

Rebecca was startled to see Joy Jayhawk standing on the path. Her blond hair was in a low ponytail and she wore a dark denim jacket, another reminder that late summer had turned into fall. Rebecca was surprised that Joy had called out to her; Rebecca’s eyes had been closed and Joy could have hurried past without being spotted. But she’d chosen to say hello.

That was something.

“I wasn’t sure if you were asleep,” Joy said, stepping onto the
grass and walking over to where Rebecca sat. Charlie came running over with his little squeaky toy, and Joy petted him on the back and threw the rubber cat, sending Charlie scampering after it.

“Just thinking about some stuff,” Rebecca said, squinting up at Joy in the bright sunshine. “I’ve got some relationship woes of my own.”

Joy glanced over at Charlie, who was racing back with the rubber cat. She threw it again, and Charlie went running. “The boyfriend back home and the new guy?”

Rebecca nodded. “Michael is basically telling me he’s not going to wait much longer, and I understand that. I’m leaving him hanging and … then there’s Theo.”

“So things have progressed between you two?” she asked, sitting down beside Rebecca. She plucked out a long blade of grass.

“Seriously progressed.” She closed her eyes again. “I wish I knew what to do, how I felt. Michael and I have been together for two years. He’s been with me through some very hard times. He was there when my dad—”

“Died,” Joy finished.

Rebecca glanced at Joy. “He arranged the funeral for me. He did everything.”

Charlie ran over and dropped the toy by Joy’s knee, then chased after a white butterfly. “And yet you’re seeing someone else.”

Guilt crept up along her spine. “Michael’s a good person, but things between us have been so … wrong lately. I used to think we were just going through phases, since we’ve been
living together for a year and we sometimes get on each other’s nerves. I mean, that’s normal, right?”

“Normal enough that my husband is living in the basement,” Joy said, then suddenly stood up as though she realized the conversation was getting too personal. Too … sisterly. And outside the context of Rebecca as mediator. “I have to get going. Preschool pickup. See you Monday night,” she said, then walked back to the path, stopping to pet Charlie.

Rebecca watched Joy until she disappeared around a bend. This was the first time they’d talked about
her
, about
her
troubles. The way
sisters
did. It didn’t answer any of her questions about Michael and Theo, but it sure made her feel better.

“You don’t
understand
,” Joy snapped at Harry for the tenth time. Or was it the eleventh?

Rebecca had been sitting on the Jayhawk-Joneses’ love seat for twenty minutes, Joy and Harry on the sofa across from her, each on an opposite end, Joy completely rigid like a marionette with an imaginary string holding up her body with perfect posture, and Harry sprawled out as though trying to take up as much room as possible. Joy would say her piece, and Harry would listen with gritted teeth, looking as though he might explode any moment with “What kind of idiot are you?” And Joy, who’d ever so slightly pause at his every sigh, raised eyebrow, and head shake, would stop midsentence and say, “What’s the point?” and cross her arms over her chest. Then Harry would say his piece, and Joy, looking like she might cry or storm off, would either say “That’s not fair” or “You don’t understand.”

“No,
you
don’t understand,” Harry said for the tenth or possibly eleventh time. And then, for the very first time, he stood up and walked out of the room. Rebecca heard a door slam, then a car starting and backing out of the driveway.

Joy, her brown eyes a mix of fury and hurt, stalked up the stairs. Rebecca heard another door slam.

Oh no, oh no, oh no. Why had she thought she could help? She wasn’t a mediator. She wasn’t a marriage counselor. She wasn’t
anything
, and she was fooling around with someone’s marriage. Not just someone’s—Joy’s.

In divorce mediation, the end result was all about avoiding a battle, a trial, the back and forth of costly attorneys. What you needed to get the couple to agree to was fairness—and what was fair to each depended on everything from one or both of the spouses’ moods in that moment, to black and white numbers, to inventory, to
stuff
.

But saving a marriage wasn’t about what was arbitrarily fair. It was about love.

Maybe she’d given them too much open air time, too much freedom to say their piece, something they’d been doing on their own. She’d need to come up with a different approach for them. An approach based on the heart, not the bottom line, even if in this case the bottom line
was
saving the marriage.

She went into the kitchen and wrote a note on the refrigerator magnet pad:

Joy and Harry, please don’t be discouraged by tonight. The first time is usually the hardest. It can seem like you’re getting nowhere, but you’re both blowing off steam and getting started in listening. I’d like to try again ASAP
.

—Rebecca

She imagined Joy coming downstairs in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, finding the note and crumpling it in a ball and stuffing it down the garbage disposal.

“What you need is one of my world-famous massages and perfect hamburgers,” Theo said.

She’d called the minute she flung herself inside her car outside the Jayhawk-Jones house, her heart heavy, her shoulders slumped, her mind a jumble of worries. And out came the entire story in a rush of details, details she hadn’t shared with Theo because she’d thought they were too personal to Joy or to both Joy and Harry, but she realized how central
she
was to the details right now—the DNA test, the inheritance.

“See you in twenty minutes,” he said.

“I hope your massages aren’t
that
well known,” she said, but he had already hung up.

His massages
should
be world famous. Between his warm hands and the delicious-smelling Kama Sutra oil, which apparently heated on contact with skin, she completely relaxed. She lay facedown on her bed, and he kneeled over her, kneeding, pressing, smoothing, rubbing. Every now and then he would whisper something sweet or naughty in her ear, but he
never took off his own clothes, never touched anything but her back and her feet and her shoulders. He disappeared for a few agonizing moments to draw her a bubble bath, then continued pressing those strong hands of his into her until he whispered, “C’mon,” and led her by the hand into the bathroom.

“I cook, you soak.”

He was the perfect man. “Thank you, Theo.”

And twenty minutes later he appeared with a towel and took his time drying her off and dusting her with his special powder, which apparently was edible. She smelled so good she could eat herself. Which was a good sign: She was hungry. She’d gotten back her appetite just in time for dinner.

She came downstairs to find Theo lighting the candles on the kitchen table, two plates with burgers (and she could see they were topped with the works—lettuce, tomato, onions, pickles) and sweet-potato fries, which she loved.

“Is there anything you can’t do?” she asked, biting into the burger, which was as perfect as he’d proclaimed.

“I can’t draw a straight line,” he said. “Which is why I’m not an architect. I also can’t make a decent pot of coffee.”

She smiled. It was true about the coffee.

“And I can’t go around pretending to be a marriage counselor,” she said, pushing her fries around on her plate. “Michael was right. I’m not a mediator.”

“Michael your boyfriend,” he said.

“Michael the something,” she said, instantly regretting it. What was she
doing
?

He eyed her, then uncapped the two bottles of Shipyard beer and poured them into the beer mugs she’d thought to
buy during her shopping spree, despite never drinking beer. “Joy and Harry are talking, which is always good. Bad is when people retreat but don’t talk, don’t communicate at all. From what you said, they’re still on the same old argument, so that’s nothing new. Which means you didn’t make things worse. They’re just the same. Comfortable and familiar in an unfamiliar area—them talking to you. They’re both new at that. So you’re on the right track.”

The glow of the candle cast shadows on his handsome face. “How’d you get to be so smart about all this? And how’d you learn to cook so well, anyway?”

He smiled. “I like working with my hands.”

She grinned. “I see. I’m happy to have been the recipient more than a few times. Charlie, too. He loves his doghouse.” She upped her chin to look out the window, where Charlie’s little black and white form was curled up on his round bed, his little head hanging over the edge of the bed out of the doghouse.

They ate, listening to Johnny Cash, who Theo insisted was soothing to the mind and spirit, and Rebecca had to agree, though she wasn’t sure if it was Theo, the massage, the bath, the food, or all of the above that had wrapped itself around her like a hug. It started to rain, and Charlie came running to the sliding glass doors to be let in. She loved the sound of rain against the window and the roof when she was cozy and warm inside—even after Charlie shook his wet fur all over her.

With their beer and two cupcakes that Theo had stopped at Mama’s to buy, they sat on the couch in the living room, Charlie curled up at their feet.

“Better?” he asked.

“Much better,” she said. “I owe you in a big way.”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

She took his hand and held it. “Maybe a requirement of talking to anyone about their marriage should be being married. What the hell do I know about being married? What that kind of commitment is like? I have no idea what really goes on in a marriage.”

“You don’t have to be the thing to do the thing. You just need insight and feeling. And you have both. Given that it was the first session, they probably expected too much—he probably expected her to suddenly understand his side, she expected the same from him, so they both dug in their heels even more.” He leaned down to scratch Charlie behind the ears. “It’s a tough situation because they’re both right.”

She stared at him. “You think so? I think Harry’s more right.”

“Of course you do. You want what you want from Joy. So does Harry.”

“All I want from her is to be my sister. He wants quite a bit more.”

“No, not really. He wants what you want: Joy to open up, be emotionally present for him one hundred percent. That’s what you want. You want her to be your sister in the true sense of the word.”

Out of nowhere she felt the prick of tears. “You’re right. That is what I want. That’s all I want. It’s a lot, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “She met you, what, a few weeks ago? Yeah, it’s a lot. Harry’s been working at getting Joy to open up for years, Rebecca.”

She hadn’t looked at it that way before. “You’re right again. It must seem like a lot of pressure. A sister barreling into her life out of the blue, asking for a relationship based on nothing more than a father she never met.”

“What if it turns out that she’s
not
your sister? What then? Are you prepared for that?”

“No. I’m not going to prepare for it because I know she is my sister.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You know one hundred percent without a doubt?”

“Well, not without a shadow of a doubt. But I’m ninety-nine point nine percent sure.”

“And if that teeny percentage point says she’s not your sister. What then?”

She looked away from his intense hazel eyes. “I don’t know. Go back to New York? I don’t know.” And she really didn’t know. Could she stay here, build a life here when the reason she came stopped existing?

He stiffened. “You mean go back to Michael?”

“No. I mean I don’t know. I don’t know.”

He put his glass down on the end table. “So this thing between us is what? Just something you’re doing while you’re here?”

“No. I didn’t mean it that way.” What was this? Since when did Theo pressure her to know how she felt, what she felt?

“Then … ?”

“I don’t know, Theo.”

“When you rented this house, I thought you’d made a decision. I thought you were
here
. But what you’re saying is that
you don’t know what you’re doing with me. And ‘the something’ in New York is on hold. Do I have that right?”