Finding Joy (The Joy Series)

by Jenni Moen

  “No, it’s good, Mom, but you just killed my appetite.”

  She laughed. “I’m sorry. I promise I won’t talk about my sex life any more.” She slid the plate back over in front of me and winked.

  “Ma!”

  “What?” she asked innocently.

  “Please don’t say stuff like that to me. I don’t want to even know that you have a sex life.”

  “Whatever. You’re a grown man. I’m pretty sure you know how it works. Which reminds me. Why don’t you tell me about your sex life. You said she’s from Dallas.”

  “Ma,” I said on a groan, pushing the plate away from me again.

  “You’re not back with that terrible Carissa again, are you? Isn’t she Cuban?”

  “No. I’m not, but she’s Puerto Rican, not Cuban. Besides, I thought you liked her.”

  “That’s right. Liked her? No. Not after what that wretched little bitch did to you. Who was that friend of yours that she screwed?”

  “Brian,” I mumbled. My mom looked away and the sad, distant look on her face made me wonder if she had been screwed over, too. Was that what had happened with my dad? Had he cheated on her? He’d split so soon after Joy’s death that I’d just assumed that that had been the cause. Maybe it had been something entirely different. That was a question I’d never be comfortable asking.

  “You know what they say, once a cheater, always a cheater,” she said, coming back to me. “I’m glad you got rid of that one.”

  She was glad now, but when I finally got around to telling her who I was actually seeing, Carissa was probably going to look a whole lot better in my mom’s eyes … even if she was a cheating whore.

  “So … obviously, this thing is serious if you’re traveling and spending the holidays together.”

  “Yeah, Mom. It’s serious. It doesn’t get any more serious. She’s it for me.”

  “But you’re afraid to introduce me to her, aren’t you?” she asked. “You’ll fly half-way across the country with her, but you’re afraid to introduce me to her. I told you I won’t embarrass you. I’m in a good place.”

  In a good place. That’s what Warren had told me, too. I hoped it was a good enough place to block out the punch to the gut that I was getting ready to deliver. “I’m not afraid of introducing you to her, Mom. I’m afraid of introducing her to you.”

  Her head cocked to the side in confusion. “I don’t understand,” she said. Her forehead furrowed as she tried to make sense of what I was trying to tell her.

  I reached across the table and wrapped my hands around hers. “I don’t know how to tell you this. I’ve thought and thought and thought about it, and there’s no good way to do it. There’s just no way to soften the blow.”

  “What are you talking about? Soften the blow?” she asked, gazing intently at me.

  I squeezed her hands and forced myself to hold her gaze though it would have been so much easier to look away. “The girl I’m seeing … is Alexis Harper.”

  Unlike Warren, my mom had no trouble recognizing the name. Big wide eyes looked back at me in disbelief as the news settled around us. As if frozen, we sat staring at one another for what must’ve been an entire minute. Even my breathing stopped, the air trapped in my chest. The only movement between the two of us was the rapid blinking of her eyes.

  Finally, she came back to life. She pulled her hands out of mine and dropped them in her lap. The wrinkles across her forehead danced as she grappled with my words. “What do you mean, you’re seeing Alexis Harper? Do you mean that you ran into her in Manhattan? We’ve always known that was a possibility.”

  “No, Mom. I mean, I’ve been dating her. I’m living with her, actually.”

  “You’re living with her?” Her head shook back and forth in slow motion, as if she still couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “For how long?” she asked.

  “Six months.”

  “You’ve been living with her for six months?”

  “Actually, we’ve only been living together since the end of September.” That wouldn’t help her to deal with it, but I was spinning my wheels and grabbing onto anything that would make this easier.

  It was in that exact moment that the full meaning of my words hit her. Her eyes narrowed into angry little slits, but she said nothing more. The scrape of her chair against the tile floor was the only sound in the deathly quiet kitchen.

  “Mom,” I said, my voice echoing around the still room.

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she turned away from me and walked toward the doorway that led into the main part of the house.

  “Mom.” Even to my own ears, I sounded tired, weary. And like I was begging.

  Without looking back, she held her hand up to cut off whatever I was going to tell her. “I need a few minutes,” she said in a dry, scratchy voice. She disappeared around the corner, and a few seconds later I heard the faint clicking of a door shutting down the hall.

  CHAPTER 18

  Alexis

  I shoved through the throng of department store shoppers, trailing behind my mom. She was on a mission.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said, catching up with her. “This is only the worst shopping day of the year.”

  My mom smiled at me. Amidst the throng of shoppers, she was in her element. It was comical, really. My otherwise very snobby and standoffish mother, who generally frequented only the most exclusive shops in Dallas, absolutely adored Black Friday. On that one day of the year, she liked to mingle with the masses. I’d tagged along today because I needed a distraction. I couldn’t just sit around all afternoon, thinking and worrying about where Adam was.

  “Hey, I didn’t make you get up at four this morning, did I?”

  “Only because you were too hungover from last night?”

  “Oh, sheesh. It was just a couple of glasses of wine.”

  Right. More like ten.

  She stopped in her tracks. “Do you feel it? The excitement? It’s a treasure hunt, Alexis. This is consumerism at its finest.” I couldn’t help but laugh at her enthusiasm for spending my dad’s money.

  Before I could confirm that I did indeed feel it, I was bumped from behind and pitched forward. I caught myself and didn’t even bother to look for the offending person. Shopping was a full body contact sport under circumstances like this.

  “Allie?” a hesitant voice asked.

  Since Adam and my dad were really the only people who called me by that nickname these days, the words caught my attention even when the manhandling hadn’t.

  A harried-looking man stood beside me. He held a small girl who I guessed to be no more than 4 though I had little experience in judging children’s ages.

  “Thomas?” I asked.

  Thomas Daniels had been my high school sweetheart until he had broken my heart. I’d always assumed he abandoned me after the accident because I wasn’t perfect any more. He came from a picket fence family just like me. But unlike my family, his had always been waist-deep in Texas politics and unforgiving of any type of imperfection. It had been a foregone conclusion that he would follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps, and that he would need a perfect little wife to stand by him … a perfect wife who could give him 2.5 children. After the accident, I didn’t fit the bill, and he had easily moved on. Naturally, I’d held a grudge ever since.

  “That is you,” he answered. “Wow. What’s it been? Years?”

  “A decade or so,” I answered. I looked to my mom. Her enthusiasm had waned, and she now looked guiltily back and forth between me and my high school boyfriend.

  “Well, you look great. I mean, really great.”

  Time had been good to him, too, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I smiled meekly. “Thanks. Who’s this?” I asked, gesturing to the dark-headed girl in his arms.

  His face lit up. “This is my daughter, Sarah. Sarah, say hi to my old friend, Allie.” Sarah smiled shyly before burying her head in her dad’s shoulder.

  �
�Sarah and I are shopping until we drop, aren’t we baby girl? What do you ladies call it? Retail therapy?” he said. A melancholy expression that didn’t match the lightness of his words passed over his face as he looked to his daughter for confirmation. It lasted only a second, but I hadn’t missed it before a broad, genuine smile took its place.

  “Well, it was good seeing you,” he said. “Maybe next time you’re in town, we can get together for coffee or a drink or something. And catch up.”

  “Maybe,” I said, nodding. “It was good seeing you, Thomas. And it was nice meeting you, Sarah.” The little girl smiled weakly before ducking her head again.

  I started to turn away, but he reached out and grabbed my arm with his one free hand. “Hey, I meant what I said. You look really good. You look … happy.”

  “Thanks,” I said, somewhat taken aback. “I am. I really, really am.”

  He just smiled and nodded before disappearing into the crowd. Staring at his retreating back, I realized that I couldn’t say the same about him. He didn’t look happy. And I realized I wished I could say that he looked happy.

  The fact that grownup Thomas wasn’t deliriously happy didn’t warm my heart like it once would have. My grudge had disappeared. Maybe it was because I now realized that it hadn’t been completely his fault. My parents were as much to blame for his abandonment of me as he was. But something far more important was at play here. I’d moved on. I realized that I just didn’t have all those negative feelings anymore.

  The moment that you realize that you’re no longer a slave to your past is a beautiful moment … even when it takes place in a department store on the busiest shopping day of the year. I felt liberated.

  “It’s just awful,” my mom said, bringing my moment of personal growth to a screeching halt.

  “What’s awful?”

  “I bumped into his mom at the club a few weeks ago. His wife has some sort of really aggressive cancer. She’s already stage four. Deirdre said they don’t expect her to make it to Christmas.”

  “What?” I gasped.

  She shook her head sadly, looking over my shoulder in the general direction that Thomas and Sarah had disappeared. “Really awful,” she repeated. “Sarah is their only child.”

  My heart, the same heart that he had broken so many years ago, broke for him now.

  Poor Thomas. He hadn’t gotten his picket fence family after all.

  He hadn’t gotten his perfect wife and 2.5 children. He would be a widower dad before he was 30, raising a child all by himself. She was so young. In a few years, she would barely remember her mother. It was gut-wrenching.

  “No family is perfect, dear,” my mother said as if she could read my mind. “They all have their problems. Some are more tragic than others. Some are self-made, and others are out of our control. As sad as it is, Thomas will survive it. Just like you, he’s surrounded by people who love him, and they will pull him through.”

  I’d heard words similar to these not very long ago.

  You wonder when it’s going to get easier for us, but it’s not easy for anybody, Allie. Everyone has their shit. It’s different shit for different people, but it’s still all shit. Being able to deal with it ... that’s where greatness lies. And we’re great.

  “Let’s go, mom,” I said, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward the lines of people waiting to check out. I couldn’t stand to be in this store a minute longer.

  I wanted to go home. I wanted to see Adam. No, I needed to see Adam. I needed to tell him about the epiphany I’d just had. I had been teetering on the edge of it for a couple of days, but now everything was clear.

  All I needed was him. Nothing else. No one else.

  He was my everything, and I would give him everything.

  And that would be about as perfect as life could get.

  Adam

  My mother had been locked in her room for well over an hour. I wasn’t about to leave now, even though that’s probably what she wanted me to do. Instead, I wandered through the house. She’d done work here and there. ‘To spruce it up,’ she said. New tile flooring had been laid in the entryway, and it appeared that the wood floors had been refinished. Every wall had been slapped with a fresh coat of paint.

  However, the renovations were only skin deep. The contents of the house were exactly as they had been 15 years ago. The couch where I’d spent countless hours playing video games as a teenager was still the only couch in the living room. Sheet music for ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ still rested on the piano in the dining room. It was as if the child practicing the song had wandered away just minutes ago instead of almost 11 years ago.

  And the pictures of our former family … they were everywhere. If Mom had removed them from the walls when painting, she’d hung them right back up in the exact same place when she was finished. I wondered, if I pulled one down, would I discover that she had just painted around them. The outdated photos gave the impression of an intact family. But I knew otherwise. We’d never been that.

  I made my way down the hall and turned into my room. Unlike Allie’s room that looked like she’d never lived in it at all, mine looked like I’d never left. High school track medals still hung from pegs along the wall over my desk. I opened the closet door, halfway expecting to find a pile of my laundry in the hamper. But it was empty. However, the backpack that I had used during my two years at UT was propped up against it. If I looked inside, it was probably still full of books from the classes I’d abandoned after Joy’s death.

  It was as if time had stopped the day Joy died. Even the alarm clock on the bedside table flashed the wrong time, as if the power had gone out and no one had bothered to reset it. The entire house felt like it was frozen in time, and I wondered why I had never noticed that nothing had changed. With that thought, I returned to the hall. I glanced toward my mom’s room and listened for any sign of life. But the house was deadly silent.

  I would give her just a little longer.

  I opened the only other closed door in the hall and stepped inside. My chest felt tight. My lungs barely able to grab enough of the stale air.

  If this rest of the house was a shrine to Joy, this room was a mausoleum. I turned in a circle, taking it all in. Like my room, there was no sign that more than 10 years had passed. A stack of books sat in the small rocking chair. A pile of Barbies had been tossed to the side of Barbie’s mansion, and Ken was still in the driver’s seat of the pink Corvette. A blue Cinderella dress was flung across the end of the bed. It was as if Joy had just abandoned it all to go out and play. In fact, that was exactly what had happened, and here it all sat years later. Untouched.

  I sat down on the side of the bed, and it creaked and groaned beneath me. I ran my hand across a purple and green butterfly on the quilt before laying back and staring at the ceiling. The curtains were drawn, but enough light came in around the edges that the room was still reasonably lit. It wasn’t dark enough for the star stickers that covered the ceiling to glow. Would they still glow when it got dark? They had been up there for so long it didn’t seem possible.

  Suddenly, I was exhausted. Being here was draining the life out of me. The last thought I had was that being here had to also be draining the life out of my mom.

  _________________________

  My eyes flipped open as the bed moved beneath me. I was still draped sideways across it. My legs hanging off the edge just as they had been when I had sat down.

  I was no longer alone. My mom lay beside me, staring up at the same stars that had put me to sleep. The room was darker now, leading me to wonder what time it was. Allie was probably wondering when I was coming for her. By this point, she was probably wondering if I was coming at all.

  “Tell me about her,” my mother said hoarsely. “Tell me why. I don’t understand how you could even talk to her, let alone spend time with her.” Her voice was dry and scratchy, giving away that she had been crying.

  I was silent for a second, wondering what I could possibly tell
her that would justify my betrayal. Did she really want to hear about how much I loved Allie? Did she want to hear how special she was? Could she even take it?

  None of it would matter. I was sleeping with the enemy.

  My mother would never see it any other way, and she was absolutely right to feel that way.

  Still, I had to try.

  “It didn’t start out this way. I ran into her in a bar. I’d always wondered what would happen if I saw her, but in a city of 3 million, I thought, ‘what are the chances?’ Turns out the chances were pretty good.”

  “So I was supposed to meet a friend … Burke … but he stood me up. I just looked up and there she was. It was after work, and she was all dressed up in her expensive clothes, hanging with her rich, pain-in-the-ass friends.

  “It enraged me. I’ve never been so angry in my whole life. I introduced myself. I didn’t even lie about who I was. The fact that my name meant nothing to her just pissed me off even more. Never in my life have I wanted to hurt somebody more than I wanted to hurt her. I mean, I wanted to physically hurt her.”

  “But I didn’t. Instead, I took her home with me, and I came up with a plan. It wasn’t even so much a plan as it was a vague idea that somehow I would make her pay for what she’d done to us.”

  I went on to lay it all out there for my mom. I told her everything I had done. I told her about the emails I’d deleted, the virus I had put on Allie’s computer, and all the other things I’d done to sabotage her career. I didn’t tell her about the topless picture Allie had sent me. Not because I was ashamed of how close I’d come to uploading it to that website (though I was), but because it would only further tarnish the image she had of Allie. The situation was bad enough. I didn’t need to make it worse.

  All this time, my mom hadn’t said a word. But when I told her about the school project that Allie had stumbled on, a quiet sob escaped from her. “Can I see it?” she asked, referring to the film I had made about the accident.