On the twenty-fifth of June each year Joy drove her former neighbor, Helen Simmons, to the Island Cemetery to place a wreath of flowers on the grave of her husband Jack to mark the day of his death. Jack Simmons had died in 1997 at the age of sixty-four. This year Mrs. Simmons was eighty-four; she had been Joy’s first friend when Joy and Maggie moved to the island all those years ago, before they moved to their current cottage.
“When are you going to get married, Joy?” Mrs. Simmons asked about thirty seconds after she got into the car, accompanied, as always, by a great cloud of perfume. She always wore a summer dress to the cemetery, along with thick-soled orthopedic shoes (“Bunions!”) and pantyhose. Mrs. Simmons didn’t believe that a woman should show bare skin on the lower part of the body unless she was at home. Joy always put on a sundress out of respect but she drew the line at pantyhose. She had worked for two hours in the shop that morning in order to free herself up, and she had Maggie in there helping Olivia. Maggie could practically run the shop on her own.
Joy turned on Chapel Street, braking for a horde of jaywalkers.
“Summer people,” said Mrs. Simmons.
“I know!” said Joy, hoping she could steer the conversation away from marriage. “Just the other day I couldn’t get into my own parking space—”
“So when?” said Mrs. Simmons. “When will I be going to your wedding?”
“I’ve already been married, Mrs. Simmons. It didn’t work out. You know that.” They had some version of this conversation every year: Joy told Mrs. Simmons how Dustin had left the marriage to pursue his dream of becoming a rock star. “I really need to focus on the band,” he’d said. “If I’m going to get anywhere.”
To that Joy had said the cruelest thing she could think of, maybe the cruelest thing she’d ever said to anyone: Whether or not you focus, Dustin, you’re not going to get anywhere. You’re not going to get anywhere. Because you don’t have any talent.
He left anyway.
“Dustin,” said Mrs. Simmons. “I don’t know how he let you go.”
“Well, he did,” Joy said. “Somehow he managed.”
“His loss.”
“Thank you.” Joy paused. “It was a long time ago. I’m over it now, really I am. And anyway, if that marriage hadn’t ended, I wouldn’t be here! I wouldn’t know you.”
“That’s true,” Mrs. Simmons conceded. “You came here to heal something that was broken. A lot of people come here for that.”
This was a surprisingly insightful comment from Joy’s passenger, and it was also true.
When Joy was nine years old her father’s older sister, Branca, who had no children of her own, had rented a house on Block Island and invited Joy’s parents, Joy, and her brothers to stay for a week. The house had been near Vaill Beach, backed by a dramatic cliff, reached by walking down a path through Snake Hole Road. It had been one of their only family vacations; closing the auto repair shop for that many days was too great an expense for her family to absorb more than that one time. Joy had never been as happy in her life as she’d been that week on Block Island. When Dustin’s departure punched a hole in her heart and she felt something substantial and essential leaking out of it, she’d come back.
“You can’t be married to those moon pies, you know.”
“Whoopie pies, Mrs. Simmons. They’re whoopie pies.”
“Either or,” said Mrs. Simmons.
Joy set her lips together and said nothing. Joy’s mother’s mother, Fionnula, whose family had settled in Roxbury after leaving County Offaly, Ireland, worked as a young woman at the Berwick Cake Company, where the whoopie pie was first manufactured. (This statement was super-controversial, Maine and Pennsylvania also claiming provenance.) Fionnula had a special liking for Joy; Joy was the youngest, and the only girl, and the most Irish-seeming product of her middle daughter’s marriage to a Portuguese Fall River auto mechanic. (Her snub nose. Her feistiness. Her tendency toward sunburn.) And so, when the rest of the family was at the shop—the boys working on the cars, Joy’s mother keeping the books—Fionnula and Joy baked and baked and baked.
The pies were so big, though! Sometimes the size of a hamburger. Too big. Too unhealthy, with the Crisco in the filling. Too much like a rock that had fallen accidentally into your stomach.
Joy stopped baking in college. She worked at her father’s shop; she worked at a questionable Olive Garden. She scarcely cooked when she was in her early twenties (wrapped up in Dustin) and also when Maggie was an infant (exhausted by motherhood). But when Maggie turned one and her afternoon nap became long and predictable, when Dustin started disappearing to who-knew-where, Joy began experimenting with her own version of Fionnula’s whoopie pie. Smaller—the diameter of a cucumber slice—with more palatable fillings, interesting flavors, and no trans fats. The whoopie pie: reinvented.
“Holy crap,” said her brother Erico, when she presented him with a sample plate. “These things are amazing. They’re like little joy bombs.”
Bingo.
With the money Dustin gave her when they split—she had no idea how he’d managed to acquire it, they’d been so poor for the entirety of their brief marriage, there had to be something illegal about the funds with which he finally supplied her (drugs? Joy didn’t want to know)—she rented a tiny bungalow off West Side Road. Then she took out a small business loan and opened Joy Bombs, the island’s first and only whoopie pie shop.
Screw you, Dustin, she thought, as she shopped for commercial ovens, perfected her recipe, experimented with different seasonal fillings: pumpkin, peppermint, mocha. More salt in the salted caramel, or less? (Always more, was the correct answer.) Screw you and the horse you rode in on, Dustin. It was an expression her aunt Branca had favored, uncharacteristically crude words, yes, from someone normally so genteel. But effective. Joy’s anger kept her going. She was a wronged woman! With a little girl to care for!
Then one day she woke up, fed Maggie and dropped her off at the little day care on the main street, unlocked the door to the bakery, looked around at the five small tables, the restaurant-grade espresso machine, the spoons lined up like soldiers awaiting orders, and realized that she didn’t need her anger anymore. In fact, she didn’t even have her anger anymore. It had floated away on an island wind.
Maggie turned three, then four, and so on. She was a delight: aggressively freckled, curious, funny. Joy made friends. She began to understand the rhythms of island life. The way you worked your fingers to the bone during the summer in order to make enough money to survive the winter. Which of the island’s ponds offered the best ice-skating. Where to look for barn owl nests along Mohegan Bluffs. She was too busy to be angry, too consumed and (dare she say it) too happy to feel wronged.
But there were times that two-thirty in the morning found her wide awake, staring into the vast darkness, wondering about growing old alone. Wondering what would happen when Maggie went off to college. Would Joy one day become a crazy old lady who talked only to her cats?
To guard against this possibility (and because she didn’t like cats) she took Maggie one day when Maggie was eight to the animal shelter in Warwick to pick out a puppy. They ended up with Pickles, a whitish beagley mix with a black eyebrow-shaped patch over one eye.
“I love her,” said Maggie. “She looks like someone interrupted her when she was putting on her makeup.”
And just like that, they were a family of three.
“But you’re all alone!” continued Mrs. Simmons now. “You should get married again. You should at least have a beau.” Joy giggled inwardly at the word beau. It was a wonderful word, really. It deserved to come back into circulation.
And it would be nice to have a beau, Joy agreed. It would be even nicer, perhaps, to have sex again. With the exception of three summer flings and that awkward business a couple of years ago with Bob Herbert, who ran the auto repair shop, Joy lived like a cloistered nun. If cloistered nuns had daughters to raise and small businesses to run.
“I’m not all alone,” she told Mrs. Simmons. “I have Maggie. I have Pickles. Tonight, Maggie and I are making a dish from our favorite food blog: it’s a new twist on spaghetti with clam sauce. Maggie’s going to dig the clams herself, today! You should come for dinner!”
“Shellfish allergy,” said Mrs. Simmons primly. “And you won’t have Maggie and Pickles forever.”
“I know,” said Joy regretfully. “It’s a real shame that dogs’ life spans are so much shorter than ours.”
“You lose the daughters, is what I meant. That’s how it goes. My two daughters I never see. My son: All the time. I can’t get rid of him.” Mrs. Simmons always wore lipstick for the cemetery visit, and never mind if she colored outside the lines. At least she was trying. Joy thought that was very brave.
“Well. I have my business too, you know, Mrs. Simmons.”
“You need a beau,” she repeated staunchly. After a beat she said, “What’s this I heard about a food truck coming to the island? Who wants to eat food that comes off a truck? That sounds very dirty, if you ask me.”
“It’s not a pickup truck, Mrs. Simmons, it’s a— Think of it as a mobile kitchen. Like an ice-cream truck, but with different kinds of food. Anyway, they’ll never get the permitting, not in time for summer. How’d you hear about it?”
“Same way I hear about everything. My Thursday night card game.”
“Bridge?”
“A little bridge, a little canasta. Speaking of. You know where you should take me sometime? That Mohegan Sun. Barbara Galveston’s daughter took her there two weeks ago and she won eighty-five dollars at the craps table.”
“Okay,” said Joy. “Okay, why not? Let’s do that someday.” She could probably get Holly to go along on an adventure like that.
At the cemetery, Joy pulled up the paved road to where it started to become a dirt path. “Here we are,” she said. “You remember where you’re going?”
“Of course I remember!” Mrs. Simmons shook her head at Joy and reached for the shopping bag at her feet, in which Joy knew was a wreath made out of the same flowers she’d had in her wedding bouquet (roses and peonies). She had held her handbag on her lap like a pet the whole ride. “Thank you for the ride. I will be ready to go home in half an hour.”
Mrs. Simmons always needed half an hour, which seemed to Joy like quite a lot of time, but she didn’t question it. Perhaps Mrs. Simmons needed to catch Mr. Simmons up on the events of the year. Usually Joy walked across the street to Ball O’Brien Park to watch the children playing on the town playground or the skate punks doing their tricks in the skate park. Sometimes she brought a mug of coffee or a snack and sat at one of the picnic tables in the pavilion. She used to bring Maggie to this playground quite often, so she watched the young mothers pushing small children in the baby swings, and the older kids pumping their legs to make the big-kid swings go as high as they could, and she tried not to feel too nostalgic about the inevitable and soul-crushing passage of time, because after all, children couldn’t help that they grew up.
This year, Joy didn’t feel like sitting at Ball O’Brien Park and watching the children. She turned off the ignition and got out herself, took a look around the cemetery. Some of the graves had flags waving beside them. Some had freshly planted flowers or dying bouquets. Some (most) had nothing at all.
She watched Mrs. Simmons bob and weave her way through the graves, clutching her handbag in one hand and the shopping bag with the wreath in the other. Finally her bobbing head disappeared from view. Joy looked at the set of gravestones closest to where she stood: the Starr family. The father had lived from 1919 to 2010; the mother from 1923 to 1995. But the children! Two sons, one dead at age sixteen, one at age twenty-six. Unfinished Words and Music read the gravestone on the latter.
Imagine being those parents, outliving both sons. Imagine being the dad, outliving his wife too! Joy turned away and walked toward where she knew Mr. Simmons’s stone to be, just to make sure Mrs. Simmons had arrived safely. For a moment she couldn’t locate her. Then, as she drew closer, she saw that she was kneeling by the gravestone. No, more than kneeling, she had two hands on it and she was bowed over it. And she was sobbing. Joy turned away quickly. To mourn like that! After all these years! Joy couldn’t help but wonder, who would she mourn in such a manner? Only Maggie. And there was no way—no way in hell—she was letting Maggie die first. If Maggie died, Joy would Romeo-and-Juliet herself right next to her, no question.
But what a world it was. You could lose your husband when you were in your sixties, and you could live out the rest of your days a widow, appearing quite content, and yet one day a year you could put on lipstick, crooked though it may be, and pantyhose, and you could cry over the grave of someone who had been dead for twenty years. What a world.
“You’re married to those moon pies,” Mrs. Simmons accused again on the way back. “That’s who you’re married to.” She had wiped her eyes and brushed off her knees and by the time she bobbed and weaved back to Joy the only trace of her sorrow was a smudge of her lipstick line.
“Whoopie pies,” said Joy. “And I’m not married to them.”
“You may as well be,” said Mrs. Simmons resentfully.
“Oh, Mrs. Simmons,” said Joy.
Unfinished words and music: Didn’t they all have those inside themselves, at the end?
She chose a different route back this time: Center to Beach to Corn Neck, skipping Ocean altogether. Why not? It was a summer morning, and she had a little time to be adventurous.
“Are you lost?” asked Mrs. Simmons, peering out the window.
“Mrs. Simmons. Of course I’m not lost! I’ve lived here for eleven years!”
“Well, this isn’t the route we took on the way there.”
“Don’t worry,” said Joy. “I’ll get you home.”
As they rounded the curve toward the end of Corn Neck Road, Mrs. Simmons said, “Careful, now!” and Joy slowed down, because there was a large crowd of people standing in line for—something. The line was encroaching on the road.
“What’s this crowd?” asked Mrs. Simmons. She rolled down her window and stuck out her head. “‘Grand opening,’ that sign says. ‘Free samples.’ Slow down, Joy! I want to see.”
“I’m hardly moving,” grumbled Joy. There was a pretzel of anxiety baking in her stomach. There must be at least fifty people in the line.
“Ooo la la,” said Mrs. Simmons. “The Roving Patisserie. It’s French!”
“French-ish,” corrected Joy. “I mean, really I think it’s basically a cookie truck.”
“It must be good!” cried Mrs. Simmons. Her face was alight with hope and possibility. “Look at that line.”
“People aren’t lining up because it’s good, they’re lining up because it’s free, and people love free stuff.”
“Can we stop? I’d like to see what they have.”
Joy set her lips together and tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Simmons,” she said. “I’m very sorry, but we can’t stop. I’m afraid I’m due back at the store ten minutes ago.”
“Well, then you should have taken the other route home. It was faster.” A note of petulance crept into Mrs. Simmons’s voice, and she folded and refolded the shopping bag that had held the wreath.
Joy’s phone pinged. A text from Maggie: I got a job.
Joy used Siri to text back: You have a job. Maggie’s job was helping at Joy Bombs. Her other jobs were wearing her funny T-shirts and her Converse sneakers in all different colors, and being a stepdaughter to Dustin’s second wife, Sandy, while being careful not to like her as much as she liked Joy.
“Talking to a phone,” grumbled Mrs. Simmons. “With no one on the other line.”
Another job, Maggie wrote back. Mother’s helper.
Great, texted Joy. Can’t wait to hear about it. But all the way back home, after she drove past the blasted food truck (she might have to talk to Holly again about the permit, see if everything really was completely up to snuff), as she navigated summer foot traffic and summer bike traffic, she felt the force of Maggie pulling away so strongly it felt like they were the poles of two magnets, repelling each other. She couldn’t help imagining a time, not too far in the future, when Maggie would be gone from her and she wouldn’t even know the first thing about her daughter’s life.
And she couldn’t help thinking, Mother’s helper? What about this mother? What about this mother right here? Who’s going to help this mother?