That Old Cape Magic (23 page)

could
have done it. Standing just where he’d been with that shit-eating grin on your face. Same one you’ve got now.”
Griffin turned to examine his face in the mirror. What he saw there was a grimace, not a grin. A well-earned grimace, come to that.
“Like you were enjoying the whole thing,” Jason continued. “Jared thought the same thing.”
“Jason,” Griffin said, “you and your brother arriving at the same conclusion isn’t really a test of its validity. Seek some genetic variety would be my advice.” Griffin half expected this observation to provoke further hostility, but it didn’t.
“It’s true,” the other man chuckled. “We sort of share a brain, don’t we? Always did. No reason to call us morons, though.” Finished, he gave it a shake, zipped up and came over to the sink.
Griffin stepped aside so Jason could wash his hands. His forearms were striped with angry yew scratches, but they weren’t swollen like Laura’s. “I apologize if I called you a moron.”
“What do you mean
if
?”
“And I wasn’t enjoying it,” he told him, to set the record straight.
“I’m just saying it’s how you looked. Call it a misunderstanding, I guess. Anyway, nobody died, and tomorrow’s a new day,” he said, vigorously washing his hands of the old one and yanking a paper towel from the dispenser. “You think this
wedding’s
fucked up, you should try Iraq.”
“Yeah, sure, but New England weddings aren’t supposed to invite that kind of comparison,” Griffin said, pleased that he was again capable of making such subtle distinctions, more or less effortlessly.
“I’m only saying,” Jason shrugged, tossing his wadded-up towel into the bin. He apparently saw no need to elaborate further on what, exactly, he was only saying.
“Tell your brother all families are fucked up,” Griffin said. “It’s not an argument either of you can win.”
“That’s truly warped,” Jason said. “You know how you end up if you go through life thinking like that?”
“No, how?”
“You end up like you. One working eye, with twigs and shit in your hair.”
Griffin couldn’t help smiling, though it literally hurt to.
“I’m sorry I punched you, though,” Jason admitted thoughtfully. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I realize now it probably wasn’t just because you called me a name and pushed Pop into the hedge. The way I’m figuring it, subconsciously?” Here he pointed at his forehead, perhaps to suggest where such delicate, refined “figuring” took place. “Subconsciously, I was still pissed at you for being such a prick to my sister. You think that’s possible?”
Griffin did, consciously.
At the nurses’ station he was told his wife was in examination room 2B, where he was treated to an unexpected sight: Brian Fynch, glassy-eyed, being wheeled out of the room on a gurney On his forehead, a knot the size of an egg pushed up through his Ringo bangs. Griffin was pretty sure he hadn’t been one of those hurt when the ramp collapsed, so … what? He’d been injured at the
hospital?
Inside the room, Joy, dressed for some reason in a pale blue Johnnie, was seated on the examination table, looking shell-shocked. “What happened to …” He’d been about to say
Ringo
, but caught himself.
His wife sighed deeply. “I warned him not to keep looking at it.” She showed him her finger, which lay at an almost anatomically impossible angle. “But I guess he couldn’t help it. He got really pale, and then …” She pointed at the wall, specifically at an indentation in the plaster that looked to be about the same size as a college dean’s forehead. Griffin had to look away lest she observe one of those vintage shit-eating grins Jason had accused him of wearing earlier. When he finally turned back, though, he saw that Joy herself was smiling. A grudging, guilty smile, but still definitely a smile. “You know the wet sound a ripe cantaloupe makes when you drop it on the kitchen floor? That’s what he sounded like.”
“Jesus,” Griffin said, feeling genuine sympathy for the man. His wife’s finger was a truly gruesome sight, enough to make a squeamish man light-headed, and he was, like his father before him, a squeamish man.
“Don’t you faint, too,” she said, slipping the hand under her Johnnie.
Back in the men’s room, after washing his face, Griffin had congratulated himself that the abstraction and confusion he’d felt after being pulled from under the hedge had mostly dissipated, but now, studying his wife, he wasn’t so sure. “I guess my question would be, why did you have to get undressed for them to set your finger?” Also, how in the world had she
gotten
undressed with her finger bent back like that?
“We discovered something else.” She pulled the Johnnie forward, exposing her left side and part of her breast, beneath which there was a three-inch gash. It hadn’t bled much, but it looked deep. “I’m going to need stitches.”
Okay, it had been a bizarre day, Griffin thought, with its mazes and man-eating hedges and collapsing wheelchair ramps and dead ventriloquist parents, but
this
had to be the strangest thing yet. Think about it. He’d spent most of his adult life with this woman. He’d forfeited the right to admire her body, though it was even now—admit it—capable of stirring lust. How perfectly, ludicrously insane not to be able to take this same woman in his arms and at least try to comfort her, comfort them both. Why shouldn’t he? What possible reason could there be? Well, he could think of a couple. For one, another woman was waiting patiently for him back at the B and B. Maybe he wasn’t in love with her, but he did feel—okay, admit this too—great fondness, which meant he should not be drawing his Johnnie-clad wife into his not entirely innocent embrace. And there was knot-headed Ringo, who would appreciate neither the comfort he meant to provide Joy with nor its accompanying erection.
“You might as well tell me what you think of him,” Joy said, as though she’d read his thought. Something in her tone suggested she had her own misgivings about the man, reservations his fainting had confirmed.
Griffin shrugged. “He seems amiable enough,” he said. “Bit of a booster, maybe.”
“That’s his job,” Joy said, and he knew immediately he’d said the exact wrong thing. “He sells the college. It helps to have an upbeat personality.”
“Nice change of pace, too,” he added, sounding more bitter than he meant to, more the “congenitally unhappy” man she’d accused him of being last summer.
“It has been, actually.”
Feeling the wind go out of his sails and his earlier wooziness return, Griffin slumped into a folding chair. “I know it’s crazy,” he said, “but I can’t shake the feeling that all this is my fault.” Meaning, he supposed, not just his behavior on the Cape last summer and their subsequent separation but also tonight’s fiasco, most of which—the rotten railing; Harve’s injuries, whatever they turned out to be; Joy’s broken finger; the grade-A jumbo egg on Ringo’s noggin; his daughter’s swollen Popeye forearms—no reasonable person could have held him responsible for. Nor did it stop there. Whatever happened from this point forward would be his fault as well. When a big string of dominoes falls, you don’t blame the ones in the middle.
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
some
thing,” 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.”