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?