The Secret of Joy Read online

  IT’S NOT A SECRET ANYMORE …

  MELISSA SENATE’S THE SECRET OF JOY IS WINNING RAVES!

  “A wonderfully heartfelt story about hope, possibilities, and the yearning for real connections. The Secret of Joy will take you on a much-needed vacation, while sneaking vital life lessons in when you’re not looking.”

  —Caprice Crane, international bestselling

  author of Family Affair

  “The Secret of Joy is a heartwarming story that hits all the right notes. Senate has you cheering for more.”

  —Cara Lockwood, USA Today bestselling

  author of I Do (But I Don’t)

  Critics adore the bestselling novels of Melissa Senate

  “Smart, funny …”—USA Today

  “Warm, witty.”—Booklist

  “Endearing.”—The New York Post

  “An absolute delight.”—The Daily Buzz

  “Tantalizing … entertaining.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Cheeky.”—Newsweek

  “Fresh and lively.”—The Boston Globe

  The Secret of Joy is also available as an eBook

  THE SECRET OF JOY

  A NOVEL

  MELISSA SENATE

  Downtown Press

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

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

  Copyright © 2009 by Melissa Senate

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Downtown Press trade paperback edition November 2009

  DOWNTOWN PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected].

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Senate, Melissa.

  The secret of joy / Melissa Senate.—1st Downtown Press trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Maine—Fiction. 3. Chick lit. I. Title.

  PS3619.E658S43 2009

  813’.6—dc22 2009020034

  ISBN 978-1-4391-0717-1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6659-8 (ebook)

  For my mother

  acknowledgments

  I wrote this book during one upside-down year and have many to thank for their support and good cheer. (Wow, that was unintentionally Seussesque.)

  First, to my editor, Jennifer Heddle, for everything, including that amazing editorial letter, the perfect title, and the cover of all covers.

  To superagents Kim Witherspoon and Alexis Hurley of Ink-Well Management, for assuring me (and quite rightly so!) that I’d find a happy new home.

  To my family, for their willingness to drive eight hours to Maine with dogs and small children—and extra thanks to my mother, for journeying with me to Wiscasset one beautiful summer day.

  To my friends Lee Nichols Naftali and Elizabeth Hope, for all the coffee and Indian food and talking.

  To Adam Kempler, for always giving me the extra time I needed to write.

  To the administration, staff, and teachers at my son’s school: Catherine Glaude, Raelene Bean, Jen Beaudoin, Cheryl McGilvery, Meg Pachuta, Valle Gooch and Margi Moran. Your above-and-beyond kindness and generosity enabled me to know my son’s heart, mind, and psyche (and hip) were being well cared for during a very tough year of wheelchairs, casts, braces, and sitting out. I could not have lost myself in a fictional world and written this novel without that comfort.

  And to Max, who inspires me every minute of every day. You are the definition of a great kid.

  THE SECRET OF JOY

  prologue

  When Rebecca Strand was five years old, she saved her money—quarters from drying dishes, a dollar bill for the one tooth she’d lost so far—to buy a sister. She had in mind someone like her best friend Charlotte’s nine-year-old sister, Olivia, nice enough to French-braid their hair and teach them how to play Miss Mary Mack, yet tough enough to chase down the block bully who twice tried to pee away their chalk-drawn hopscotch board.

  Rebecca had brought her Curious George piggy bank to her parents for help in counting what she had. “Do I have enough?” she’d asked. “Grandma Mildred said kids cost money.”

  Her mother, unaware that Rebecca did have a sister (no one knew, except Rebecca’s father, of course), sat Rebecca on her lap and told her about the birds and the bees. That yes, kids cost money, but the reason Rebecca didn’t have a sister—or a brother—was because God hadn’t blessed them with one.

  Now, more than twenty years later, Rebecca tried to remember if her father had looked pained as her mother explained what God and biology had to do with each other. If he’d excused himself from the room. Or if he’d just stood there, smiling as always.

  one

  The moment Rebecca did learn she had a half sister she never knew existed—a twenty-six-year-old half sister—she was twirling (just one twirl, really) in a hand-me-down wedding gown and her beat-up Dansko clogs in her father’s hospital room. The dress wasn’t hers. It belonged to Michael’s mother. And though Rebecca wasn’t entirely sure she loved Michael Whitman, her boyfriend of two years, she adored his larger-than-life mother with her Real Housewives overly long blond hair, showy jewelry, and supersized heart. According to Rebecca’s married friend Charlotte, being fond of a man’s mother ranked high up on the pro side for marrying him.

  Glenda Whitman had driven close to two hours from Connecticut today when she heard that Rebecca’s father had taken a turn for the worse. She’d whisked Rebecca off for a quick bite because “I know you need your lunch hour to see your dad,” then mentioned that the dress bag she was schlepping around was for Rebecca, that maybe it was time she and Michael got serious about being serious. Rebecca had unzipped just the top and saw something very white and very satiny.

  “I’m making a statement,” Glenda had said, laying the garment bag over Rebecca’s arm before kissing her on both cheeks and dashing off on her heels with a tossed back, “I’ve always wanted a daughter just like you.”

  I once had a mother just like you, Rebecca had thought. In your face in a good way. Funny, kind, bighearted. A know-it-all who really did know it all. “She was a menschy yenta,” her Jewish father always said of her Christian mother. “The best kind.”

  Her mom would have loved Glenda Whitman. Michael, not so much.

  With the garment bag weighing a thousand pounds on her arm, Rebecca went to NewYork-Presbyterian to see her father. The hospital was like a palace, all atriums and marble and glass-enclosed wings overlooking the East River. She hated the place.

  “Fancy shindig tonight?” her father whispered, eyeing the dress bag. His voice, once so radio-announcer strong, was now nothing more than a hoarse whisper. He lay in the standard-issue cot, IVs and poles aplenty, beeping constant, a Mets cap covering what was left of his sparse brown hair. There were flowers in vases everywhere, so many that they lined the wall underneath the window.

/>   “Michael’s mother is making a statement,” Rebecca said with a bit of a smile, a bit of a shrug, smoothing the down comforter over her father’s slight form. “She thinks it’s time we got engaged.” She rolled her eyes, then pulled a pair of SmartWool socks from her tote bag. “I got you the best socks, Dad. They are so warm.”

  He smiled and tried to kick his feet out from under the comforter, but the lightweight down barely moved. That was how little strength he had left. As she slipped the thick blue and white marled socks on her dad’s skinny feet, he said, “Try on the dress for me, Becs. This’ll be my only chance to see my baby girl in a wedding gown.”

  She kept the Oh, God, do I have to? to herself. Her father had days, maybe a week, left on this earth, and if he wanted to see his only child in a long white dress, so be it.

  Days left. The relentless truth of it made Rebecca burst into tears everywhere since she’d gotten the news of his collapse three days ago—at work with clients, in the supermarket while checking eggs for cracks, on the subway, and this morning while watching a man she barely knew from her apartment building hoist his two-year-old daughter onto his shoulders as they headed out.

  “Be right back,” she said, tears pooling in her eyes. There was no “Be right back” with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She could be right back in a split second and he could be gone.

  She went into the small bathroom and took off her Whitman, Goldberg & Whitman–approved gray pantsuit and slipped into the wedding gown. It was one size too big, but beautiful, simple, perfect. A strapless princess dress, not too poufy, not too plain. She stepped back into her comfy commuting clogs to make herself a little taller (she was only five feet two) so that the gown wouldn’t trail on the well-worn tile floor.

  She stared at herself in the mirror above the sink, almost surprised to see she looked exactly the same. Yup, there was the same shoulder-length, wavy, chestnut-brown hair. Same pale brown eyes. Same fair skin, paler these past few days, since her father had been admitted and would not be discharged.

  She felt like the gown was getting tighter, squeezing her.

  “Becs?” her dad called.

  I do, I don’t, I do, I don’t, she thought as she came out. She should want to marry Michael Whitman, handsome young partner at Whitman, Goldberg & Whitman (not that he’d asked). But every special occasion, holiday, and birthday, she held her breath until she opened his gift and breathed a sigh of relief at the doorstopper edition of How to Be a More Effective Paralegal or the charm bracelet with charms that made no sense to her. A tiny silver tennis racquet? Rebecca had never even held a tennis racquet. Last month, for her twenty-eighth birthday, she’d almost hyperventilated over the small jewelry box he’d handed her until she’d opened it to find exquisite diamond stud earrings, a half-carat each.

  “You’re beautiful, Becs,” her father whispered, but then his gaze strayed over to the wall, his attention on the little poster of fire-safety rules. He turned back to her. “You should know that you’re—” He clamped his mouth shut, then let out a deep breath. “That you’re not going to be all alone when I go.” His voice cracked, and he coughed, and Rebecca sat down on the edge of his bed and took his hand.

  “Michael’s a good guy.” Her dad didn’t need to know about her ambivalence. Michael was a good guy.

  “I don’t mean him.” He burst into tears and covered his face with his hands. “Rebecca—I …”

  “Dad?”

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he said, dabbing at his eyes. “I’m just so damned emotional. Pour me some eggnog, will you?”

  Rebecca headed over to the minifridge. It was only mid-September, but eggnog had started appearing in the supermarket along with the giant bags of Halloween candy that Rebecca easily ignored. As if she could pop fun-size 3 Musketeers bars in her mouth when her father was dying.

  He wanted to be surrounded by certain favorites, ones he’d whispered in her ear. And so every day she brought something he loved, from the eggnog to strawberry cheesecake, from Junior’s (his beloved original on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, even though a Junior’s had opened close to her office in Grand Central) to a greasy, no-good Steak-umms sandwich piled high with fried onions. The cuddly down comforter she’d bought him for Hanukkah last year. And Neil Diamond’s greatest hits on repeat on his iPod, her present for his fifty-ninth birthday last week.

  He burst into tears again. She hurried back to him, then realized she’d forgotten the eggnog and spun around, the beautiful white dress swishing at her ankles. The one thing her father hadn’t done since he’d been admitted this time around was cry. Daniel Strand was tiny for a man, only five feet four like Michael J. Fox, and he’d told Rebecca he’d learned in first grade that never crying and being very funny was the way to make up the inches with the other kids. Rebecca could think of only two times she’d seen her father cry: when he’d told Rebecca her mother had died and then again at the funeral.

  “There was a baby,” he whispered.

  She set the plastic cup of eggnog on the gray swivel tray over his bed. He’d been doing a lot of this these past few days: throwing out the odd reference to events big and small. Big like her mother, who’d died when Rebecca was nineteen. Medium like Finn Weller, who’d broken Rebecca’s heart during her senior prom. Small like Cherub, Rebecca’s childhood guinea pig, who’d lived a short, uneventful life in a cage on her pink and white dresser. “We had a dog,” he’d said last night. “What was its name?” His brown eyes had twinkled with memory, but then he’d turned and stared out the window, his expression heavy and sad. “Bongo, was it?” Rebecca had held his hand and reminisced about their dear little beagle, Bingo, reminding him of how he’d taken her to the ASPCA on her sixth birthday and let her pick out any pet she wanted, from the biggest dog to the tiniest kitten. She’d chosen the sad-faced beagle, and every morning and every night, she and her father would walk Bingo together, singing funny versions of the old song—that first year, anyway. “Was a chicken, laid an egg and Bingo was its name-o…”

  “Is a baby,” her father said. “Is. Is.” Tears pooled, and he turned his head toward the wall, his gaze on the poster of fire-safety rules again.

  Rebecca tried to think what her father was referring to, hoping to fill in a blank for him. Perhaps her mother had lost a baby and they’d kept it a secret from Rebecca?

  “I never wanted you to know, Rebecca,” he said, his voice cracking again. “Your mother never knew.”

  Whoa, Rebecca thought, her shoulders stiffening. Wait a minute. What was he talking about?

  “Dad, what baby?”

  “She called her Joy.”

  “Who?” Rebecca asked.

  Tears streamed down her father’s face. And for the next half hour, between sobs and “I’m sorry,” Rebecca slowly learned the story of a baby named Joy Jayhawk. Of an affair, a summer affair in Wiscasset, Maine, where the Strands had gone for vacation. There’d been a woman named Pia Jayhawk, an artist.

  Rebecca had a half sister. A twenty-six-year-old half sister.

  This made no sense. Her tiny, hilarious father, the kindest person she’d ever known, had a secret life?

  “Don’t hate me, Beckles,” he whispered. “Please just don’t hate me. I can’t go with that. But I had to tell you. I couldn’t go without telling you.”

  Beckles. He’d started calling her that when she’d come home complaining that she didn’t have freckles like the reigning queen of first grade, a girl named Claudia. And when he’d been calling her Beckles, somewhere in Maine was a four-year-old who was probably starting to ask where her own father was.

  “I have a half sister,” she repeated. “I can’t believe this.” Rebecca stood and paced the room, stared out the window at the stretch of gray water. A hot shot of anger slammed into her stomach, but at the effort it took him to take a deep breath, the sadness returned, the grief.

  He took another deep breath, then another, and told her about the phone calls he’d received from Pia Jayhawk when the fami
ly had returned to New York. There were two: the first to alert him to the pregnancy, the second to the birth. A girl, six pounds even, named Joy.

  “When she called to tell me she was pregnant, I didn’t say anything. Not one damned word,” he said, staring up at the squares of ceiling tile. “She’d said, ‘Daniel, are you there?’ And I didn’t say anything. I just held the phone, not breathing, afraid to move a muscle. And she said again, ‘Daniel?’ And finally she said, ‘Okay,’ and hung up.”

  Rebecca stared at her father, unable to process this. The words were just building up on top of each other.

  “Every day I expected the phone to ring again, expected your mother to answer it, expected her to come ashen-faced to find me with ‘I know.’ But weeks passed, and months, with nothing. I think I was in some kind of denial. It just went away and I didn’t think about it.”

  Didn’t think about it? This couldn’t be right. This couldn’t be.

  “Until she did call again,” her father said on a strangled sob. “The day the baby was born. I thanked her for informing me, then hung up and went back to the Sunday crossword. I finished the entire puzzle, Rebecca.” He covered his face, then let his hands drop as he stared up at the ceiling again. “And then I suggested to your mother that we take you to the Central Park Zoo and maybe the carousel. We never made it to the carousel because you couldn’t bear to leave the polar bears. You screamed every time we tried to wheel your stroller away. By the time we were back at the apartment, it was as though the phone had never rung.”

  He explained it was why they moved a few weeks later to the Westchester suburbs. Why their telephone number was never listed. Why he dared never make another false move.

  Her mother’s face, the sweet doe eyes and long, strong nose, her wavy auburn hair, floated into Rebecca’s mind. Norah Strand had died almost ten years ago, three days before Christmas during Rebecca’s freshman year in college. A speeding cab at the corner of Lexington and Sixtieth, right in front of Bloomingdale’s, where her mother had bought a pink cashmere hat and matching gloves that Rebecca still used every winter. Rebecca, a dazed, grieving mess, hadn’t gone back to Cornell. Despite a complete lack of interest in the law, she’d worked for her dad’s law firm for a while, not wanting to take her eyes off him for a second, then commuted to Hunter College to finish her degree (psychology) and earn a paralegal certificate for its structure and security, its “you are now this” quality. She’d lived with her dad in the too-big Westchester colonial through college and her postgrad work. He’d been so devastated by her mother’s death. Seemed so devastated.