Apples Never Fall

They waited.

“How’s Indira?” asked Troy.

“She’s fine,” said Logan, his face blank.

“You still living—”

“Yes.” Logan cut him off. So they were still crammed together in that crummy one-bedroom town house Logan had bought decades ago. Troy’s mother had mentioned that Indira wanted to move a few years back, but that had obviously gone nowhere.

“How was New York?” Logan asked, without discernible interest.

“Great,” said Troy.

As far as Troy knew, Logan had never been to New York. Imagine never having been to New York and acting like it didn’t matter. Did Logan even have a passport right now? The thought of not having a valid passport made Troy hyperventilate, but Logan seemed to live his life within the confines of a tiny radius encompassing his workplace, their parents’ house, and the homes of his married-with-children high school friends. Today’s exciting adventure to Savannah’s apartment might be the furthest Logan had traveled in years.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t had the opportunities: Logan was offered a tennis scholarship to the University of Chicago, two years before Troy was offered one at Stanford, but he’d turned it down. He’d said, No thanks, I’m good, without apparent regret.

In fact, all four of the Delaney children had been offered tennis scholarships to prestigious American universities. Troy was the only one with the brains to take the offer, the only one capable of seeing what a chance like that could mean to a Sydney public-school kid. It still infuriated him. His brother and sisters could have changed the direction of their lives. They thought it was a decision about tennis.

They didn’t get that tennis was merely the key that unlocked the door to a bigger, shinier world. Tennis didn’t just get Troy into Stanford, it kick-started his career. His family enjoyed that story. Once he’d even overheard Logan recounting it: how Troy was in New York doing a summer internship competing against a group of terrifyingly slick young graduates for a coveted permanent position at Barclays Bank, when one day a gray-haired guy came into the office and said, with quiet menace, “Which one of you kids is the tennis player?” Troy raised his hand and the guy said, “I’ll pick you up after work. Full whites, please.” Troy had to run into Macy’s in Times Square on his fifteen-minute lunch break and buy the first white clothes he could find, no time to try them on. A shiny black car took them out to a pompous tennis club where they played doubles against two guys—one old, one young—who they decisively beat: 6–0, 6–0. Turned out the scary gray-haired guy was the big enchilada and he hated the other old guy, for a reason never explained. There were a lot of hard-eyed smiles that day.

Guess who got the permanent position?

Yes, his family loved that story. They loved any story where a Delaney won a match, or won anything. But it was almost like he needed each of his siblings to say: I should have taken the scholarship like you, Troy, then I’d have a life like yours, when in fact all three of them seemed to view Troy and his life’s choices not with envy but with a kind of amused, detached superiority, as if money and success were shiny, childish toys, comical and absurd.

It was true that Brooke’s migraines gave her hell when she was a teenager, so she had no choice but to quit tennis altogether and stay in Sydney to study. Amy was Amy. She couldn’t cope with the stress of competitive tennis. He never got his older sister until the day she explained it: “Think of your worst pre-match nerves. Except there’s no match. It’s just Tuesday morning. That’s how it feels to be me.” But Logan should have said yes to Chicago! He’d been smarter than Troy at school, and he had that incredible forehand. Did he ever do anything with that brain or that forehand?

Troy tried to imagine his brother in a classroom teaching. Who exactly took these classes? And what exactly did he teach in “business communications”? How to format a business letter? How would Logan know? Had he ever sent one in his life? People

emailed these days. He imagined Logan wearing a cheap Kmart tie, one their mother had probably given him for Christmas, standing at an old-fashioned blackboard scribbling in chalk: To whom it may concern, Yours faithfully, Dear Sir/Madam. And then shrugging whenever a student asked a question.

To be fair, he was probably a good teacher. He’d been the best out of all four of them at coaching, and the only one who seemed to actually like it. He got that same fixed, focused look on his face as their dad did when he watched a kid play. Any kid. Even the useless ones. Logan was probably only fourteen when Troy heard him say, “You look away from the ball at the last second” to a little kid who Troy would have written off as having no hand-eye coordination.

But that was tennis. Logan couldn’t feel passionate about spending his days teaching business communication skills to help little wannabe businesspeople enter a world Logan had no interest in entering himself. It was just … wrong. Logan was leading the wrong life and didn’t care, and for fuck’s sake, why did Troy care that he didn’t care?

When he was a kid all he’d wanted to do was beat his older brother, in anything and everything. It was the point of his entire existence. Winning his first match against Logan had felt like a cocaine high, except, just like cocaine, it also made him feel sick. He always remembered, with resentment and mystification, how nausea had tainted the edge of his win, how he’d gone to have a shower to cool off and thought he was fine, but then he lost his temper with a tennis kid who had wandered through the back door into their house. (He hated it so much when kids thought their kitchen was a clubhouse facility.)

It was almost like he’d felt guilty for beating his brother, as if being two years older gave Logan a lifelong right to win against Troy.

These days their father seemed to be equally impressed—or equally unimpressed—by the careers both his sons had chosen. Brooke was the only one who impressed their dad, because she was his favorite and she was “starting her own business.” Stan didn’t seem to notice that Troy had also been his own boss for years.

This was what happened whenever Troy saw his family. He regressed. His emotions started to gallop all over the place. He wanted to beat Logan when Logan wasn’t even playing. He got jealous of the attention his dad showed his baby sister for her little physiotherapy practice. For fuck’s sake, you would think he was Amy. It was humiliating.

“You were in New York for work, right?” said Logan.

“And pleasure,” said Troy.

There was no point talking about the work part. Whenever Troy tried to explain what he did for a living, his family would get the same expressions of focused yet vacant concentration as they might if they were trying to tune in to an out-of-area radio program and were only hearing every twentieth word through the static. His mother, bless her heart, had even subscribed to a podcast, Chat with Traders, and took notes while she bravely listened to it, but to date she was still none the wiser.

“So … been on the court lately?” Troy gave Logan a speculative look. It had been years since they’d played each other.

Logan gave an irritated exhalation, as if Troy had asked this same question multiple times before, which he was pretty sure he had not. “Nope. Not for a while now.”

“Why not?” asked Troy, genuinely interested. “Not even with Mum and Dad?”

“No time.” Logan fiddled with his left wrist as if to indicate an invisible watch.

“No time,” repeated Troy. “What a crock of shit. You’ve got time to burn.”