Waking Up Joy Read online

  Waking Up Joy

  A Novel

  Tina Forkner

  Waking Up Joy

  Copyright © 2014 Tina Forkner

  EPUB Edition

  The Tule Publishing Group, LLC

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-940296-71-5

  This book is dedicated with much love

  and respect to my husband,

  Albert Forkner.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Southern Born Books

  About the Author

  “Into that world inverted

  where left is always right,

  where the shadows are really the body,

  where we stay awake all night,

  where the heavens are shallow as the sea

  is now deep, and you love me.”

  —Elizabeth Bishop, from Insomnia

  Chapter One

  Joy Talley—At the End of Her Rope

  1982

  ‡

  I’m still breathing, so I obviously didn’t kill myself. I just want to say that right now. I know what it looked like when my brothers and sisters found me dangling from the roof over the balcony, but—did any one of them ever think to ask why in the world I would have tied a rope around the crumbling chimney and jumped off the roof, especially when there was a perfectly stout and sprawling apple tree growing right next to Momma’s front yard?

  The magic apple tree, as some people still call it, would have been the perfect hanging tree, but, of course, they didn’t think of that. I could have even removed the cover from the old well next to the orchard and tossed myself down into its murky depths; or worse, let myself be washed away in the so-called Spring of Good Luck that spiraled deep into the ground behind our house; but I didn’t, because killing myself, accidentally or on purpose, wasn’t ever part of my plan.

  My plan was to bid farewell to the past and live free in the present, to let go of the one person who knew the truth about me. For years, I had been clutching the memory of us to my heart like a bride clutches her roses, although I would never be his bride. That much was certain, since he had let go of me a long time ago and married someone else. So, I decided to be brave as I stepped onto the roof. It was time to let go . . . time to trust the future. It was just my luck that my leap of faith landed me dangling in a tangle of rope.

  Undeniably, I am a Talley and sometimes our luck is good and sometimes it’s bad, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I fell, or that my brothers and sisters thought I jumped off the roof on purpose. They had no idea why I was up there, although it probably wouldn’t have made a difference if they had. When a family relies on luck to explain anything and everything, they’ll naturally leap to the most horrible conclusion at the absolute worst time. This was one of those times.

  When they saw me dangling over the balcony, they thought the worst, and all dashed into the house and up the stairs. If any one of them had a lick of common sense, they would’ve looked at the grimy soot on my hands and known I was up to something more important than trying to kill myself, but I guess it was the easiest conclusion they could come up with as they spilled onto the balcony and reached out past the railing to pull me in.

  Rory, the taller of my two brothers, wrapped his arms around my limp noodle legs and lifted me up, while River pulled out his pocket knife and cut the rope, thank goodness, loosening what they mistook for a poorly tied noose and pulling it over my head.

  “She never was good at tying a knot when we were kids,” River said.

  “I wonder why she did this.” Carey’s pitiful weeping made me want to scream, but of course I couldn’t.

  “Bless her heart; did she think we didn’t love her?” I couldn’t see her, but I already knew Nanette was digging through her purse for a used tissue.

  It’s funny that I heard my brothers and sisters speak every day, but the way their voices echoed around me in that moment, their Okie accents rolling around in their mouths, they sounded like a bunch of hillbillies. I reckon I sound just like them, but I hope I sound a little bit smarter. Now, I’m not putting them down, just because I made the honor roll my senior year and they didn’t, but to be honest, they weren’t always the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. Take my sisters, for instance. Each got her GED and husband, then, had passels of kids; and I have to admit seemed to be happier for it at the time.

  “Do people who do this still go to heaven?” Rory. I had to feel sorry for my baby brother. He sounded like he might cry, even though he was the bigger and the stronger of the two boys. He’d always had a tender heart—and the worst grades in school. I’m not really surprised he thought I tried to kill myself. To be honest, I’m not shocked that either of my brothers came to that conclusion. I’m just annoyed. They never were book smart, but now, they were definitely tool and dye sharp like Daddy. Those boys didn’t even bother with a GED. They could rebuild any engine around and nobody knew how they first learned it, so they opened an auto shop called The Greasy Wheel where I worked as their secretary, just around the corner from Momma’s house.

  “Momma would say, no,” said Carey. “People who kill themselves don’t go to heaven.”

  I heard a gasp. Nanette’s voice whispered back, thick with indignation. “You don’t know what Momma would say.”

  “No matter if I do or not,” Carey said, her voice hitting a high pitch, like she had gone a little nuts from all the stress. “Knowing Momma, she’d make some kind of charm and then turn around and try to pray Joy into heaven. Because we’re lucky—except when we’re not. Am I right?”

  Nanette’s voice turned sharp. “She doesn’t need to be prayed into heaven. And besides, she’s not dead!”

  Before I knew it, I was stretched across Carey’s and Nanette’s laps in the backseat of the truck headed to the hospital, instead of to the funeral home to see Momma laid out in her Sunday best, which is why they’d all come to pick me up in the first place.

  Momma.

  My heart leapt toward Momma’s memory, but then I realized it was just the truck lurching. I felt the hands of my sisters preventing me from rolling onto the floorboard.

  “Be careful, man,
” Rory said.

  “I’m in a bit of a hurry, dimwit.”

  “It won’t matter if you jostle her to death ‘fore we get there.”

  I wished I could rub away the prickling pain in my neck, but my arms were as heavy as the musty bricks in our chimney. Nanette moaned, as if she was in pain, too, and I imagined her pretty olive complexion turning sallow right up to her thick brunette ponytail. I’ve always been a little bit jealous that she wasn’t made to suffer my frizzy red mane.

  “Can you two please get along?”

  My brothers never have been able to agree on anything. Not even on how to run their shop. Eventually, they had to hire a manager to manage them because they couldn’t manage to get along with each other. Of course, it was me they hired, so I wondered what they were going to do if I didn’t come out of this alive.

  “We probably shouldn’t have moved her,” Nanette said.

  “I guess we could’ve just let her hang from Momma’s roof a few more days,” River said. “That’s how long the ambulance would’ve taken to find her.”

  I agree.

  Momma’s house really was difficult to locate at the end of a winding red dirt road that zigzagged through ten miles of twisted woods before opening up to a thousand acres of pastureland and thousands of towering oak, elm, and pine trees in the background—definitely not flat and treeless like the western part of Oklahoma. Spavinaw Junction is tucked in between Green Country and the Ozarks, right in the three corners of Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas. I’ve never wanted to live anywhere else, unless you count the ocean, and as I lay across my sisters’ laps I wondered if I would ever again see our lofty pastel blue farmhouse, a century-old structure admittedly in need of a makeover.

  I loved how it sat like a giant Easter egg where the bluffs and pasture meet, its two stories trimmed in flaking white paint and shaded by a couple of towering oak trees in the front yard. Anyone looking at our house from the outside would see it as an ideal, albeit a bit sagging, example of Americana, never guessing at the long hidden mysteries its secret spaces and passages harbored, one of them being my very own.

  Chapter Two

  ‡

  “I guess we won’t make it to the funeral home today.” I detected grief in Nanette’s voice, and my own sorrow rose up. My heart suddenly felt like a bird, a large annoying crow to be specific, banging at the bars of my chest.

  What if I miss Momma’s funeral?

  The idea should’ve brought tears to my eyes, but they were dry, despite my sorrow.

  How odd.

  “What if we have to combine the funerals?” That was Carey’s voice. If I had hands that worked I might have reached up and given her blonde, curly head a good shake. “Will two caskets even fit on the church stage?”

  Excuse me? A casket?

  Mercy, they were pathetic with their complaining.

  Carey sniffled. “At least Momma will be glad to see Joy.”

  “Carey,” Nanette scolded. “She’s still breathing!”

  I couldn’t help my thoughts. I remembered those Halloween movies I used to watch with Carey and Nanette in which the poor souls got buried alive and scratched their finger nails off trying to get out.

  I’m not dead!

  I wished I could holler the words, “I didn’t kill myself!” You wouldn’t believe how hard I tried to open my eyes.

  Nothing. Not even a blink.

  I guess I’m really dying, but not from my own hand, just my own stupidity.

  My nose tickled from Nanette’s tears.

  “Momma would hate it knowing that Joy tried to hang herself.”

  Poor Momma.

  I imagined her lying at the funeral home waiting for us, dead and waxen, dressed, I hoped, in her favorite duster robe with the tiny blue flowers that I chose for her. I wished I could get enough air in my lungs to shout.

  You’ve got it all wrong.

  Boy, did they have it wrong. As strange as it sounds, I really was simply looking in the chimney for something important before anyone else could stumble upon it, something I’d hidden together with the boy I wanted to marry when we were very young. It was something I should’ve destroyed decades ago, but kept, like any Talley, in the chimney with Momma’s charms. Even though our chimney was so easy to get into that it never could’ve passed an inspection, getting to what I had hidden inside was still tricky. First, I’d tried to climb up through the fireplace hearth on the second floor, but couldn’t reach the place where my boyfriend and I put it decades ago. Finally, I climbed up on the roof thinking I could at least shine the flashlight down and see which old brick we’d crammed it behind.

  My name is Joy, not Grace, so like an idiot I dropped my flashlight down the chimney, stumbled, and promptly fell off the roof. I guess it really was a stupid way to look for what seemed to be lost in the chimney, but I was feeling desperate. I was lucky I tied a rope to the chimney for balance, or I might have cracked my head open. And it’s a good thing my brothers and sisters showed up when they did, because it wouldn’t have been a pretty sight had they shown up a day or two later, me dead and tangled at the end of a rope that oddly resembled a noose, hanging from my momma’s chimney.

  Anyone else, with the exception of the man who had dumped me for someone else, might wonder why I didn’t just leave my secret charm—which wasn’t charming at all, I assure you—in the chimney forever; but when that stuck-up lawyer arrived only a few hours after momma died, I knew I couldn’t leave it up there anymore.

  *

  “Lease the Talley land?” I asked Mr. Littleton, a skinny, balding lawyer all the way from Tulsa, even though Momma’s bank was in Jay, just down the road. “Who would we lease it to?”

  “An investor. A farmer. Anyone who will take it,” he said. “Someone who might buy it and the house from you if it comes to that.”

  “But then I couldn’t live in it.” I glanced at the chimney and the secret charm seemed to mock me through the bricks.

  “Yes,” he said, the circles underneath his armpits slowly darkening his yellow shirt. “That’s true, but the house will have to come down someday anyway. It cannot stand forever, Mrs. Talley.” He spoke like a college-educated man. In most circumstances, I’d have been intimidated, but at the moment, I was too ticked off to be impressed.

  “Ms. Talley,” I corrected.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Talley.” He placed extra emphasis on the Ms., emphasizing my spinster status, as if he knew anything about my love life. Was I that desperate looking? I’d make a point to get my friend Peter to take me out on a date as soon as possible, just to get the town talking about my love life. And Peter’s too, for that matter. That would really confuse people, since Peter was a sworn bachelor for life.

  Why are single men in their forties bachelors, but women are spinsters?

  “Are you a bachelor, Mr. Littleton?”

  He cleared his whiney throat. “Yes. But I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  “Then don’t talk to me like I’m just a witless spinster. You and I aren’t that different. I’m a bachelor, too. I have a brain.”

  There was eyebrow raising and throat clearing. “As I was saying, when your mother opened the beauty shop for your sisters, she mortgaged fifty acres of the land, including where the house sits, to help pay for the shop.”

  I thought of Nanette and Carey, young and wanting their own beauty salon so badly. They called it Momma’s Curls, since she was paying.

  “Fifty acres isn’t much,” I said. “We have a thousand.”

  “Yes, so eventually she mortgaged four hundred and fifty more acres, including the land this house sits on. And then she fell behind on her payments,” he continued to explain everything in a tired voice, as if he’d clarified this a hundred times.

  “Why didn’t she say anything to me?”

  “I can’t answer that,” he said. “But you must understand the house itself has lost its value. It needs significant improvements that, frankly, you aren’t going to be
able to make on your budget. In fact, it probably needs to be torn down.”

  You donkey’s butt!

  He made a show of clearing his throat and sitting up straighter, and for a second I thought—and wished a little bit—that I’d called him that out loud.

  “If I might be a bit more personal, Ms. Talley?”

  “You aren’t already?”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “It would be easier if you sell all thousand acres. You would make a very tidy profit even after you paid off the mortgage.” How many men in this part of the county use the word tidy? “I happen to know of some nice places in the country, smaller places that are close to town; perfect for a woman like you.”

  Perfect for an old maid.

  It’s true that I was single, but nobody really knew why, except for me. I will give you a hint: It had something to do with what was in the chimney, of course, or why wouldn’t I have let well enough alone? Not even my brothers and sisters knew the whole story, and I didn’t want them to, either. If the house was sold, someone else might discover more than the name of the one who broke my heart.

  In a moment I kind of regretted later, I pulled the plate of chocolate chip cookies from Mr. Littleton’s hands and sent the poor man off without an answer. I still remember how disappointed he looked, but I wasn’t sure whether it was because he didn’t get me to make a deal about the Talley property, or because he didn’t get to finish his cookies. My cookies, after all, were famous in Spavinaw Junction, if I do say so myself.

  The indignant Mr. Littleton couldn’t have known that it wasn’t just losing the house I was upset about. The truth of it all tingled along the back of my neck as I ushered Mr. Littleton out the door. I watched him move tersely to his fancy black car and wondered at how he managed to get in, even though he held himself straighter than the stick up his—well, you know.

  I had slammed the door behind him and walked over to the fireplace, rested my head against the heavy mantle. Memories of trinkets and old charms taunted me. I’d removed some of them from the mantle when Momma died, because it all made me sad, but I hadn’t touched anything inside until that morning. So in a way, it was Mr. Littleton’s fault that I had decided to climb into the chimney.