“Don’t worry about it, Mum. It was a long time ago.”
Her mother had too much time on her hands. That was the problem. She was going a little dotty. She spent hours looking at old photos and then ringing her children to tell them how little and cute they’d been and how sorry she was for not noticing it at the time.
The truth was, Brooke didn’t even remember her mother dismissing her migraines. She had no memory of the “unforgivable” time when Joy yelled at Brooke for coming down with a migraine when they were running late.
What she remembered was the extraordinary, astonishing pain, and her fury with her mother for not fixing it. She didn’t expect her dad or the doctors to fix it. She expected her mother to fix it.
Brooke managed her migraines now: efficiently, expertly, without resentment. Watch for the symptoms. Get onto the medication fast. This had been the first in six months. She was responsible for the incarceration of a monster, and sometimes the monster broke free of its shackles.
“Last Tuesday, retired tennis star Harry Haddad revealed that he is planning…”
The radio announcer’s words slid into her consciousness. She flicked up the volume.
“… a return to professional tennis next year. The three-time grand slam champion retired after a serious shoulder injury four years ago. He announced his plans on social media last Tuesday and today posted a picture of himself working out under the guidance of his newly appointed coach, former Wimbledon champion Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. Haddad, who is reportedly soon to release his autobiography, is obviously hoping for one last exciting chapter in the story of his incredible career.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Harry,” said Brooke.
She changed the radio station to show her disapproval. He was making a mistake. His shoulder would never be the same and Nicole wasn’t the right fit. Former greats didn’t necessarily make great coaches. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was a beautiful, single-minded player, but Brooke suspected she didn’t have the patience for coaching.
She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel and murmured, “C’mon, c’mon,” to the traffic light. Her dad had no patience with traffic lights either, or children who took too long to put on their shoes, or romantic scenes in movies, but he had all the patience in the world when it came to coaching.
Brooke remembered how he used to watch and analyze a student, eyes narrowed against the glare—he refused to ever wear sunglasses on the court; it had been a historic moment when he let Brooke wear them in a fruitless attempt to combat the migraines—and then he would beckon the player to the net, holding up one finger while he thought it out: What do I need to say or do to make it click in this kid’s head? He never gave the same lesson twice.
Brooke’s mother had been good with the group lessons, keeping the little kids running and laughing (she wore glamorous oversized sunglasses when coaching, although never when playing), but she didn’t have the passion or patience for one-on-one coaching. She was the businesswoman, the brains behind Delaneys, the one to start the pro shop, the café, the holiday camps.
Joy made the money and Stan made the stars, except they’d lost their shiniest star: Harry Haddad.
Stan could have taken Harry all the way an
d much further, although some would argue that three grand slams were as far as he was ever going to get. Not her dad. He believed Harry could have flown as high as Federer, that Harry would be the Australian to finally break the Australian Open drought, but they would never know what could have happened in the parallel world where Harry Haddad stuck with his childhood coach, Stan “the Man” Delaney.
The light changed and she put her foot on the accelerator, thinking of her poor parents and how they’d be feeling about this news. They must surely know. The announcement was made last Tuesday. If they hadn’t seen it on the news, someone in the tennis community would have told them. It was strange that her mother hadn’t called to talk about it, and to worry about Brooke’s dad and how he’d feel seeing Harry back on the court.
It was painful to watch her dad watch Harry Haddad play tennis on television. He quivered with barely contained tension through every point, his shoulders up, his face a heartbreaking combination of pride and hurt. The whole family had complicated feelings about their most celebrated student. Multiple Delaneys Tennis Academy players had done well on the circuit, but Harry was the only one who’d made it all the way to the Promised Land. The only one to kiss that magical piece of silverware: the Gentlemen’s Singles Championship Trophy at Wimbledon. Not once, but twice.
Brooke’s dad had discovered Harry. The kid had never held a racquet, but one day Harry’s dad won a one-hour private tennis lesson at Delaneys Tennis Academy in a charity raffle and decided to give the lesson to his eight-year-old son. The rest, as Brooke’s mother liked to say, was history.
Now Harry was not just a beloved sporting icon but a high-profile philanthropist. He’d married a beautiful woman and had three beautiful children, one of whom had been very ill with leukemia, which was when Harry became a passionate advocate for childhood cancer research. He raised millions. He was saving lives. How could you say a bad word about a man like that? You couldn’t.
Except Brooke could, because Harry hadn’t always been a saint. When he was a kid, back when Brooke and her siblings knew him, he was a sneaky, strategic cheat. He used cheating as a tactic: not just to score points but to rattle and enrage his opponents. Her dad never believed it. He had always suffered from tunnel vision when it came to Harry, but then again, nearly all adults used to have tunnel vision when it came to Harry. All they saw was his sublime talent.
While playing a match against Brooke’s brother Troy when they were teenagers, Harry kept blatantly calling balls out that were plainly in. Troy finally snapped. He chucked his racquet, jumped the net, and got in a couple of good hits. It took two adult men to drag Troy away from Harry.
Troy was banned from playing for six months, which was better than he deserved according to their father, who took a long time to forgive Troy for shaming him like that.
And then, just two years later, Harry Haddad betrayed Stan Delaney when he dumped him as a coach after he won the Australian Open Boys’ Singles. Brooke’s dad was blindsided. He had assumed, with good reason, that he was taking Harry all the way. He loved him like a son. Maybe more than his own sons, because Harry never questioned a drill, never rebelled, never sighed or rolled his eyes or dragged his feet as he walked onto the court.
It was supposedly not Harry’s but his father’s decision to leave Delaneys. Elias Haddad, Harry’s photogenic, charismatic father, was his manager, and there in the player’s box at every match with a beautiful new girlfriend by his side. Brooke and her siblings never believed that Harry wasn’t involved in the decision-making process to dump their dad, in spite of the heartfelt card he sent their father, or the earnest, disingenuous way he spoke in fawning magazine profiles about his gratitude for his first-ever coach. Her dad never let himself get that close to a player again. He was beloved by his students and he gave them his all, except he kept his heart safe. That was Brooke’s theory, anyway.
Brooke drove into the busy car park of The Piazza, as her local shopping village was now called after its recent redevelopment. Everyone enjoyed mocking the “Tuscan hilltop town” theme, but Brooke didn’t care much either way. The new Italian deli was great, the café had put up some nice photos of Tuscany, the hanging baskets of artificial flowers seemed almost real if you didn’t look too closely, and at least the fake cobblestones didn’t catch heels like real cobblestones.
“Although the occasional twisted ankle would probably be good for your business, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, hey, Brooke?” the local MP had said on opening day last month, after he’d cut the ceremonial ribbon with a pair of giant novelty scissors. The MP was one of those men who gave everything he said a vaguely sexual connotation.
If this trial separation maintained its momentum and rolled all the way toward a divorce, which it seemed to be doing, Brooke would have to date. She’d have to put on lipstick and endure vague sexual connotations over coffee.
She pulled into her favorite parking spot, turned off the ignition, and looked at her bare left hand on the steering wheel. No indentations to mark her missing wedding and engagement rings. She never wore them to work anyway, and often she’d forgotten to wear them on the weekend, which was maybe relevant, but probably not. She was looking for signs she’d missed.
Brooke’s clinic, Delaney’s Physiotherapy, was a two-room office she rented in between the café and the fruit-and-veg shop. The previous tenant had been a tarot card reader whose customers still sometimes turned up hoping for an “emergency reading.” Just last week a guy in a paisley shirt and tight pants had said, “Oh, well, if you can’t read my cards you might as well check out this dodgy knee of mine.” Brooke had predicted surgery in his future.