Apples Never Fall

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. She smoothed her hair back behind her ears, and two straight pieces swung free so the tips of her ears poked out.

“Who are you?” The fright made him as rude and brusque as his father.

“I’m Savannah.” She gave a little circular wave of her hand, as if she were being introduced while sitting at a table of his friends at a pub.

He studied her. A tiny jewel in her nose caught the sunlight. He felt a familiar childish sense of grievance he instantly tried to quash. This was the way it had always been: strangers strutting about his backyard with their racquets and designer shoes as if they owned the place, but you had to be polite and friendly because they paid the bills. Once, Brooke caught a kid going through her schoolbag that she’d dumped on the back veranda and helping herself to a banana that Brooke hadn’t eaten at recess.

“Who are you?” The girl imitated his tone, her head on one side.

“I’m Logan,” he said. He rested the ladder against his leg. “This is my parents’ house.” He tried not to sound childishly defensive, as if he needed to prove that he had far more right to be here than she did.

“Hi, Logan.”

He waited.

“I’m staying with your parents,” she said finally.

“Were you a student?” asked Logan.

“You mean tennis?” said Savannah. She smiled. “No. I’m not sporty.”

She put on an oddly genteel accent when she said sporty as if she were saying, I don’t eat caviar.

“So you’re…”

“Your parents have gone out to pick up new glasses for your dad,” said Savannah. “Bifocals. They were ready to be picked up yesterday but they ran out of time because the GP ran late for your mum’s appointment and then they got stuck in terrible traffic.”

Again, he couldn’t interpret the subtext. Why was she giving him all the detail? Was she mocking Logan’s mother, who weighed down every conversation with tangential detail? Her children were the only ones allowed to tease her about this.

“Well, nice to meet you,” said Logan. “I’ll get on with it.” If she didn’t want to say who she was, he didn’t care. He lifted the ladder. “I’m cleaning out the gutters.”

“Go for it,” said the girl grandly. She tipped her head back to enjoy the sunlight on her face.

Logan turned to walk toward the side of the house. He stopped and looked back at her. “How long are you staying for?”

“Indefinitely,” she said, without opening her eyes. She grinned.

He felt a jolt of surprise almost like fear. “Indefinitely?”

She opened her eyes and regarded him thoughtfully. “I was joking. I just meant I’d like to stay here forever. It’s so peaceful.” She inclined her chin at the tennis court. “I guess you all grew up to be tennis champions, then?”

“Not really.” Logan cleared his throat.

“You were pretty lucky to have a court in your backyard.”

He assumed her thin, harsh undertone related to money. These days only wealthy people had backyard tennis courts.

“Back in the sixties every single house in this street had a court,” he said, and he heard himself parroting his old man, except his father’s point was that the tragic disappearance of backyard tennis courts to make way for apartment blocks heralded the end of Australia’s golden age of tennis. It meant working-class kids like Stan no longer spent their childhoods whacking a tennis ball but hunched over tiny screens.

Logan’s point was: Don’t you dare think I grew up rich and privileged just because this bush neighborhood got gentrified.

Logan’s dad had grown up in this house, and they didn’t know much about his childhood, except that it wasn’t happy and he spent hours on his own, working on his serve on the tennis court his own father, Logan’s grandfather, had built before Logan’s grandmother “kicked him to the curb.” Whenever she said that, Logan used to visualize a humorous image, like a children’s book illustration, of a grandpa in a rocking chair, with a surprised open mouth, hands on his knees, flying through the air, but he assumed it hadn’t really been that comical at the time.

Before Logan was born, his grandmother moved in with her older sister to take care of her while she died, which she took an inconveniently long time to do. Apparently Grandma then sold this house to Logan’s parents at “a very cheap price.” It turned out to be an expensive price, though, because Logan’s mother then felt permanently beholden to her mother-in-law and she could never convince Logan’s dad to tear up the purple floral carpet in the living room because it would offend Grandma. Even after Grandma was long dead.

When the tennis school started making money, pretty good money thanks to Logan’s

mother’s entrepreneurial streak, the house was renovated and extended. The original dingy, dark little Federation bungalow became a light-filled family home, but the purple carpet remained, a constant point of contention. Joy looked away when she vacuumed it. The rest of the house was Logan’s mother’s preferred arts and crafts style. A lot of timber and copper. (“It’s like living in a bloody woodchopper’s house,” his father once said.)