Logan didn’t go inside. He walked straight down the side of the house to collect the ladder from the shed, past the drainpipe where they all had to stand to practice their ball tosses. A hundred times in a row, day after day, until they all had ball tosses as straight and reliable as a ruler’s edge.
He wondered where his parents were, how long he had before they returned, and if his father would be angry or relieved to see this particular job done.
Troy wanted to pay people to help out their parents. A gardener. A cleaner. A housekeeper.
“What … like a team of servants?” said Amy. “Will Mum and Dad ring a bell like the lord and lady of the manor?”
“I can cover it,” said Troy, with that very particular look he got on his face when he talked about money: secretive, ashamed, and proud. None of them really understood what Troy did, but it was clear he’d landed on a level of impossible wealth that you were only meant to land on by working really hard at your tennis. Somehow Troy had gone ahead and found another way to drive the fancy car and live the fancy life, and now he played tennis socially, with bankers and barristers, and without, it seemed, any hang-ups, as if he were one of the private-school kids who got private lessons at Delaneys not because they had talent or a love of the sport but because it was a “good life skill.”
Their father never once asked Troy about his career plans.
Logan opened the shed and found the bucket, gloves, scraper, and ladder. Everything was in its place. His friend Hien said the first heartbreaking sign of his own father’s Alzheimer’s was when he stopped putting his
tools back in the right place, but Logan’s dad’s shed looked as pristine as an operating theater.
Even the glass of the shed’s small window sparkled, revealing the Japanese maple at the side of the tennis court that was just beginning to leaf up for spring. In autumn the leaves turned red-gold. Logan saw himself as a kid searching through a soft crunchy carpet of leaves for a rogue tennis ball, because tennis balls cost money. He saw himself storming past that tree the day he first lost against Troy, the same day his father told him to watch Harry Haddad demonstrate the kick serve that Logan hadn’t yet mastered, and maybe part of him already knew he never would master: he simply didn’t have that instinctive understanding of where the ball needed to be. He was so worked up that day he threw his racquet as he walked toward the house, almost hitting some poor kid waiting for her lesson who had to jump aside with a little squeak of fear.
That was the day Logan understood that his younger brother might be better than him and also, more importantly, that Harry Haddad was a prodigy, and had something essential and wonderful that all the Delaney children lacked.
He turned resolutely away from his memories and back to his father’s immaculate workbench.
Troy was a fool to think they could pay someone to come and do jobs around the house that their father had always done himself. Stan would find that demeaning, extravagant, unmanly. Logan had been in the car with his father once when they’d driven past a man in a suit standing on the side of the road casually scrolling through his phone while a roadside assistance guy was on his knees changing the tire on the man’s Mercedes. Stan had been so offended by the sight he opened the window and roared, “Change your own tire, ya big fuckin’ pussy!” Then he’d closed the window, grinned sheepishly, and said, “Don’t tell your mother.”
Logan wouldn’t let another man change a tire for him, but Troy sure as hell would, and he’d enjoy it too. He’d amiably chat to the guy while he did it. The last time they all got together, for Amy’s birthday, someone asked Troy what he’d done that day, and he said, without shame or embarrassment, “I had a pedicure.” It turned out, to everyone’s amazement, that the bloke got regular pedicures. “Oh, darling, I could have done your nails for free, saved you the money!” their mother had said, as if Troy needed to save money, and then everyone briefly and unfairly lost their minds at the thought of their mother on her knees trimming Troy’s toenails, as if Troy had actually asked her to do it.
Troy was the only Delaney to have ever experienced a pedicure. Their father would rather have pins stuck in his eyes, Joy had ticklish feet, Amy thought pedicures were elitist, and Brooke said they caused bacterial infections.
Troy didn’t care. Troy was his own man.
No one would ever call Troy passive, even though he was the one passively getting his toenails done like a fucking emperor.
“You didn’t even try to stop me,” Indira had said when she called from the airport.
“I thought this was what you wanted,” Logan said. She’d said “she couldn’t go on like this.” Like what? It was never made clear.
“But what do you want, Logan? You’re so bloody … passive!” She was crying as she spoke, crying so hard, and he was so confused, he didn’t understand what was going on. She was the one leaving the relationship, not him.
Then she’d hung up, so the word passive was the last word she’d said to him, and it kept echoing in his head until he’d become obsessed with it, examining the word and its implications from every angle. He’d even looked up the dictionary definition and now knew it by heart, occasionally muttering it to himself: Accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance.
What exactly was the problem with accepting and allowing what happens, or what others do? Wasn’t that a Zen, sensible way to lead your life? Apparently Indira’s last boyfriend had been “domineering.” Logan never domineered. He never stopped Indira from doing anything she wanted to do: even leaving, if that’s what she wanted, if that’s what made her happy. He wanted her to be happy.
So maybe no one could make Indira happy. He wasn’t going to demand she stay.
“You don’t want me enough,” she’d said at one point, maybe a week before she left, and he couldn’t speak because of the stomping sensation on his chest, and so he’d said nothing, just looked at her, until she sighed and walked away.
“You don’t want it enough, mate,” his father had said to him once on the way home in the car after Logan first lost a match to Harry fucking Haddad. Logan remembered sitting silently in the passenger seat, not saying a word, but thinking to himself: You’re wrong, Dad, you’re wrong, you’re wrong.
There was clearly something wrong with the way he communicated his own desires, which was ironic seeing as he taught communication skills.
I wanted it too much, Dad.
He put the gloves and the scraper in the bucket and hefted the ladder under one arm. He blinked in the sunlight as he left the darkness of the shed.
“Good morning,” said a female voice, and he nearly dropped the ladder. For a moment he thought it was Indira, as if he’d made her materialize just by thinking about her, but of course it wasn’t Indira.
A strange woman was sitting on the edge of his parents’ back veranda, her hands cupped around a mug of something hot, which she blew on as she looked up at him.
She had smooth, fair hair cut at sharp angles that swung either side of a skinny, ratty face. Her jeans were so long she’d had to fold them almost all the way to her knees. She wore UGG boots that looked a couple of sizes too big for her. They rolled loosely around on her feet like a child wearing grown-up shoes. Her gray hoodie had a pink logo across the front.