Apples Never Fall Read online

  “So what did they argue about, then?”

  He looked away. “My dad wasn’t always an easy man. He’s different now.”

  And now we’re getting somewhere. “Was he ever violent towards your mother?”

  “Jesus. No. Never.” He looked back up at her, seemingly appalled. “You’re getting the wrong impression.”

  Yet she saw a flicker of something: a question, a thought, a memory. It was gone before she could grab it.

  “Never?” she probed.

  “Never,” he said. “I’m sorry if I’ve made you think that, because that is so wrong. Dad could just be … moody. That’s all I meant. He shut down when he was upset. Like a lot of men of his age. But he adored my mother.” He muttered something inaudible.

  “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

  He smiled uneasily. “I said, he adores my mother. He still does adore my mother.”

  In a moment he was going to shut down himself.

  Christina changed direction. “What can you tell me about this woman who lived with your parents for a while, last year, was it? Both your sisters mentioned her.”

  “Savannah,” he said heavily. “Yeah, well, speaking of complicated. That got complicated for a while there.”

  “In what way?”

  “In every way.”

  Chapter 13

  LAST SEPTEMBER

  “So it’s just until she finds somewhere to live,” said Joy to Brooke, the cordless phone cradled between her ear and her shoulder as she dusted the living room with a green “microfiber dusting cloth” she’d bought at one of those unbearable parties where she’d had to endure various “product demonstrations” by a very nice woman whose three children Joy and Stan had privately coached for many years without improvement, and therefore Joy had felt obligated to buy three dusting cloths, one for each kid.

  Joy had a rule that whenever one of her children telephoned, she dusted (even if it was Logan calling, whose calls lasted an average of thirty seconds).

  She was in a good mood today. Last night she and Stan had sex. Surprisingly excellent sex. If she could still get pregnant, last night would have got her pregnant. (She always used to say that Stan only had to look at her to get her pregnant, which had caused a very embarrassing misunderstanding with Brooke when she was six and one day accused dear little Philip Ngu of trying to get her pregnant at recess.)

  It had been the first time in months. Joy had actually been wondering if they were done with it, and she hadn’t even been upset about it, which was upsetting in itself. She suspected it was somehow related to Savannah. Maybe it was as simple as the fact that they were closing the bedroom door again, which used to be the signal for sex, or maybe Stan’s libido was helped by the sight of a pretty young girl flitting about the place?

  Joy honestly didn’t care if that was the case. She had on occasion found excuses to wander around her own front yard while Caro’s grown-up son Jacob did the gardening with his shirt off. She’d known that boy since he was a child, but he’d grown up to look like a young Robert Redford and Joy was not dead yet.

  It really had been very good sex for people of their age, Joy thought. She had to suppress the urge to tell Brooke about how well her parents had performed in the bedroom last night, as if they’d won a particularly tough match.

  “Why are you laughing, Mum?” asked Brooke.

  “I’m not,” said Joy. “I’m dusting. It’s tickling my nose.”

  Brooke had left two voicemail messages today. She’d learned about Savannah firstly from her sister, and then apparently Logan had called the moment he left the house this morning, so she was now in a fine state. Joy knew that not calling Brooke earlier was an error of judgment. Brooke expected to be the first to find out about significant family developments. The truth was that Joy had put off calling her, because she knew Brooke would react to the news of their houseguest with incredulity, disapproval, and anxiety, and this was proving to be correct.

  “Logan said he and Troy are helping this girl move out of her apartment tomorrow.” Brooke was talking on the speaker phone as she drove home from work. It was irritating. Her voice kept fading in and out.

  “Yes, Logan insisted on it,” said Joy. “He didn’t want your father doing it on his own. He and Troy are going to drive Savannah to her apartment tomorrow and move her out. Then she’ll never have anything to do with that vile man again.”

  She moved into the living room, holding her cloth aloft, and started on the tennis ball collection. Stan owned forty-three signed tennis balls contained in small glass boxes, and it was amazing how the glass containers collected a thin layer of dust in such a short amount of time. When he died the signed balls would be the first thing to go. Some of them were probably fake. She’d read somewhere once that sports memorabilia fraud was booming.

  “What if the boyfriend turns up?” asked Brooke.

  “It will be two against one,” said Joy. “Your brothers can take care of it.”

  “What if he has a … I don’t know, a knife?”

  Joy paused. Surely he wouldn’t have a knife! “Should they take knives too?”

  “Oh my God, Mum!” Brooke exploded. Her excessive reaction calmed Joy. She wasn’t sending the boys into an active war zone. Savannah was quite positive that the boyfriend wouldn’t be there, and even if he was, Troy and Logan were very big, strong, intimidating men. Everyone said so. They’d be fine. She wouldn’t let them take knives. To be honest, part of her still didn’t trust the boys with knives, as if they were still little kids who might cut themselves or each other. She knew there was a very significant contradiction in her thinking right now.

  “He’s not going to be there,” said Joy. “He’s a graphic designer, apparently. Like Indira. I wonder if Indira knows him? I guess that’s unlikely. Indira gave me a lovely new fridge magnet, did I tell you?”

  She kept telling people about how much she loved the magnet to hide the fact that she couldn’t stand to look at it, because she’d been so crushed when she opened it. She’d been idiotically convinced it was an ultrasound picture and that Indira was hiding somewhere in the garden, watching her reaction. Mortifying.

  “No, Mum, you didn’t mention that Indira gave you a lovely fridge magnet,” said Brooke. Joy recognized the tone. She used to speak to her own mother with the same forbearance.

  “Anyway, the boys will be fine,” said Joy.

  “I can’t believe we need to get involved with these kinds of people,” fretted Brooke.

  “These kinds of people?” repeated Joy. “What do you mean, these kinds of people?”

  Brooke had never, ever been snooty. Joy hadn’t brought her children up like that. Troy liked to strut about like a peacock, flicking his shiny black credit card onto the table at restaurants—“I’ll take care of this,” he’d say—but it was funny when he did it.

  “Oh, you know what I mean, Mum,” said Brooke.

  “No, I don’t know what you mean. You didn’t grow up in Downton Abbey, darling.”

  “It’s nothing to do with money or class. I just mean people where there might be a, I don’t know, a kind of, what’s the word, criminal element?”

  “We’ve got plenty of criminal elements in our family! Your own brother was a drug dealer!”

  “Troy just sold weed to the private-school kids. You make him sound like a drug lord. He just, you know … saw a gap in the market.”

  “I can assure you that Savannah is a nice girl in a difficult situation,” said Joy crisply.

  “I’m sure she is a nice girl, and it’s awful what happened to her, but she’s a stranger, and she’s not your responsibility. You’ve got enough on your plates!” There was that new condescending tone that had begun to creep into Brooke’s voice ever since Stan had his knee operation, as if she were just weighed down with the onerous responsibility of taking care of her aging parents. It was sweet but also mildly aggravating.

  “What are you talking about? We’ve got nothing on our plates.
Not a thing. Our plates are empty, darling.”

  Joy hadn’t fully understood how bored she and Stan had been until Savannah arrived on their doorstep. Savannah gave Joy and Stan something interesting and new to talk about, and she was so sweet and grateful and pretty.

  “And Savannah isn’t a stranger anymore.” Joy peered at Agassi’s scratchy ballpoint signature on the ball as she polished. “Every person you meet starts out as a stranger. Your father was a stranger when I first met him. You were a little stranger, when I first met you.” She saw Brooke’s outraged little red face as the doctor held her up like an animal he’d rescued from a trap. Amazing to think that angry helpless baby was now this opinionated young woman.

  “You didn’t let Dad move in to your house the moment you met him,” said Brooke.

  “No, but I let you move in!” said Joy, which she thought was rather witty, but Brooke’s laugh sounded hollow.

  “Anyway, she hasn’t ‘moved in,’” Joy reassured her. She picked up the Navratilova ball. “This is temporary. Obviously.” She spoke in the brisk, businesslike voice she used with the accountants. “It’s just until she gets back on her feet. There’s really nothing to worry about. You’ll like her when you meet her. Logan liked her today! I could tell. You know what she’s doing right now?”

  “Going through your jewelry?” said Brooke. “Stealing your identities?”

  Sometimes she sounded so much like her father.

  “I don’t own any jewelry worth stealing,” said Joy. “She’s welcome to it. No. She’s cooking dinner. Pasta.” The scents of garlic and onion wafted from the kitchen. “This is the third time she’s cooked! She keeps insisting! She says she loves to cook! Do you know how wonderful it is to have someone else cooking for you? Well, you do, because Grant cooks.”

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Brooke said plaintively, “I’ve cooked dinner for you, Mum.”

  “Of course you have,” soothed Joy. “Many times.” Brooke was a perfectly competent cook, like Joy herself, but, also like Joy, she took no obvious pleasure in cooking, grimly plunking down plates with a put-upon sigh.

  Joy’s family had been, and still were, big eaters. Keeping her family fed had been a never-ending, arduous task and now that it was just Joy and Stan, she had to force herself into the kitchen each night, with the thought: This again? Savannah, on the other hand, cooked as if it was a lovely pastime, not a chore to endure, humming and cleaning as she went.

  Brooke didn’t answer, and Joy heard the traffic in the background, the angry toot of someone’s horn, and she imagined her daughter behind the wheel, frowning, worrying about that damned new clinic that Joy wished she hadn’t so bravely started, worrying about her parents who didn’t yet require her concern. The time will come, my darling, we’ll get frail and sick and stubborn and your stomach will twist with love and terror each time we call, but plenty of time, don’t get ahead of yourself, we’re not there yet.

  “The thing is, I hate cooking,” said Joy. The words rushed out of her mouth: traitorously, venomously. “You’ve no idea how much I hate cooking, and it just never ends, the cooking, night after night after bloody night. Each night at five o’clock, like clockwork, your father says, ‘What’s for dinner?’ and I grit my teeth so hard I can feel it in my jaw.”

  She stopped, embarrassed.

  “Gosh, Mum,” said Brooke. She sounded shocked. “We should get one of those meal services for you, if you really hate cooking that much. I had no idea you felt like that! All those years. You should have made us help more when we were growing up but you never let us in the kitchen! I feel terrible—”

  “No, no, no,” interrupted Joy. She felt ridiculous. It was true she hadn’t let her children help in the kitchen. They were too messy and loud and she didn’t have the time or patience to be the sort of mother to smile lovingly while a floury-faced child cracked eggs onto the floor.

  (She would be that sort of grandmother. Grandchildren would be her second chance to get it right. Now she had the time and the eggs to spare, and she would be present with her grandchildren. When she looked at photos of her children when they were little, she sometimes thought, Did I notice how beautiful they were? Was I actually there? Did I just skim the surface of my entire damned life?)

  “I was being silly, I don’t really hate cooking. I just like it when someone else puts a meal in front of me, as if I’m the lady of the manor! And it’s no big deal at all now, when it’s just for your father and me, it’s easy! Now … how are you, how was your weekend?”

  “It was nice,” said Brooke. “Quiet.”

  A sudden instinct, something about the tension in Brooke’s voice and the memory that Brooke had said she might drop by over the weekend but then never had, and Joy had been so busy with Savannah that she only just remembered now, made Joy say, “Did you have a migraine over the weekend, Brooke?”

  “So what else has this Savannah been doing all day?” said Brooke at the same time. “Apart from cooking?”

  “She’s been resting,” said Joy. “She needed a rest. I think she’s been through quite a stressful time.”

  For the first couple of days Savannah had slept for long stretches, as though she were recuperating from a serious illness, and Joy and Stan had tiptoed about the house, giving each other quizzical shrugs. Initially Savannah hadn’t spoken at all, just gratefully eaten whatever food was put in front of her. It was gratifying to see the color come back into her cheeks. As the days went by she became chattier, and she seemed so interested in Joy and Stan’s lives, and to truly enjoy hearing their stories and looking at family photos. She asked them all about the tennis school: How did they come to start it? What was it like in those early days? Was it hard to find students? Did they still play? Did none of their children want to take over the business? It was Stan who answered all those questions, who seemed to want to answer her questions; he kept getting in first—it was so unlike him!—as if he needed to do this, as if her interest was fulfilling some sort of therapeutic need, giving him “closure,” perhaps? Savannah nodded along, and never seemed to get impatient when Stan spent ten minutes trying to work out if a particular tournament had taken place in 1981 or 1982.

  “And what does Dad think about all this?” asked Brooke. Without waiting for an answer she said, suddenly suspicious, “Has he got her on the court yet? Does she play?”

  She was so transparent. Always a Daddy’s girl. It was Stan’s approval she so desperately craved, as if it were withheld from her, and yet she’d always had it, from the moment he first held her. Brooke was Stan’s favorite. Everyone knew it except for Brooke.

  “Savannah doesn’t play,” said Joy. “She says she’s not sporty. But your dad likes her.” It was actually surprising how well Stan and Savannah got on. “She and your father have bonded over some television series they both enjoy. They talk about the characters as if they’re real people.”

  “Which series?” asked Brooke urgently, as if that mattered.

  “Oh, gosh, I wouldn’t know,” said Joy. She’d never been a big fan of television, and the older she got the less patience she had for it—her lower back played up if she sat still for too long—whereas Stan had gone in the other direction and would sit in that recliner for hours watching rubbish.

  “Right,” said Brooke.

  “How’s Grant?” asked Joy. “And how’s work? I gave your card to someone the other day, now who was it? Someone who said they were having back pain, just like me, and I said, ‘Well, you must see my daughter,’ and he said—”

  “Amy said something about Dad buying her a car?” Brooke’s voice was sharp.

  “Who, Savannah? He’s not buying her a car, we were just talking about how we’d need to get her set up with a car at some point, and your dad was asking her if she’d consider the new Golf, so they went and test-drove one. You know how your dad loves test-driving cars, even if he has no intention of buying one.”

  “How is she going to afford a car? Does she even h
ave a job?” asked Brooke.

  “I think I already told you that she and her boyfriend had only just moved here from Queensland,” said Joy.

  “So why doesn’t she just move back to—”

  “Jo-oy! Dinner!”

  “I’ve got to go, that’s Savannah calling to say dinner is ready.” She walked toward the kitchen, the phone to her ear.

  “How did Dad react to the news about Harry’s comeback?” asked Brooke.

  “Oh, well, Savannah has been a good distraction,” said Joy, lowering her voice, knowing Stan was already in the kitchen sorting out their drinks. She could see Savannah through the doorway with three plates balanced on her forearms like a waitress. Her haircut looked lovely.

  “It will be interesting to see what he says about Dad in his autobiography,” said Brooke. “Do you think Dad will read it? Or will it upset him too much?”

  “Autobiography?” Joy stopped. She spun around so she was facing away from the kitchen.

  “Supposedly he’s writing one,” said Brooke. “Or he’s probably paying a ghostwriter to write it for him.”

  Would they ever be free of that boy? “I didn’t know that.”

  She should have predicted it. All the big names in tennis wrote their stories eventually. Everyone loved a success story. Their “So You Want to Write a Memoir” teacher had said “rags to riches” and “overcoming the odds” were the most popular themes for memoirs.

  There was something demeaning about Joy doing Caro’s silly memoir-writing course, while Harry, a kid whose bloodied skinny-boy knees she’d once bandaged, wrote a proper memoir that people would actually want to read. It made Joy’s entire life feel silly. A lady’s life.

  “Will you read it?” asked Brooke.

  “I don’t know,” said Joy slowly. “Probably.” She heard the low timbre of Stan’s voice as he spoke to Savannah in the kitchen.