Til death do us part
Joyce watched Adam and his father playing horseshoes with Jerry and the Reverend , under the gold-washed trees.Adam's parents had insisted on having the rehearsal dinner at their house, and there were cubed cheeses, baby quiches , and shrimp cocktail laid out on picnic tables on their wooden patio.
Adam hadn't swept Joyce off her feet or made her forget herself. She would not describe herself as "crazy, wacko in love." She loved him -not madly, not crazily, but sanely and contentedly. It didn't matter that certain young men made her feel woozy, like Cousin Charlie had, or that she sometimes fell in love in elevators. That, she decided, was a sickness similar to the flu. It passed soon enough, and then you recovered and went on with things. It was what got people like Kathy and her mother into trouble.
Joyce's mother was pleased because Adam came from a "healthy family environment." His parents had been married for thirty-four years, and he'd grown up in this farmhouse on a country road that was Still unpaved ,five miles from Nathan Hale's house. Joyce couldn't remember what Nathan Hale had done, but she liked that his house was still there,after so many years. There was something reassuring and permanent about it.
Adam had grown up climbing these same trees,playing with the horseshoes that were now thudding and clanging across the lawn. In this place,Joyce had the same feeling she sometimes got when she went back to Ebenezer Church-that it could be ten years ago, or sixty, or a hundred. That every moment was present and intact,swirling seamlessly into right now.
Sometimes it seemed to her that she had left pieces of her self under furniture that had never belonged to her, and in schoolyards with children who had never learned her name. It made her sad , as if there were small ghosts that looked like her, wandering lost in places they didn't recognize. She had tried to explain this to Adam once, when he was showing her the remains of a rocket he and his brothers had built in the barn when he was nine.
"I don't have any relics of my childhood to show you," she'd said. "I couldn't take you to any tree houses or point out any swings i used to play on. It was like, with every new father, everything just began. My mother would give a lot of stuff away. So she wouldn't be remembered of whoever it was she had just divorced. And she threw away a lot of photo albums, so I'm not even sure what certain people looked like anymore.
"Well, you've turned out great," Adam had told her. " And maybe if your life hadn't gone that way, you wouldn't be the person you are now.
"Maybe, said Joyce, doubtfully. "Besides, we've got about sixty years ahead of us to collect relics." Joyce was always relieved when he said things like that, even if she herself was not entirely convinced. Now, pulling a cube of cheddar cheese from its red-frilled toothpick, she squinted toward the lawn and imagined her sons and daughters playing on this same grass. It was much easier to picture these people who didn't exist than to imagine the older version of herself who would be right here, watching them.