Apples Never Fall

“I like to cook,” she said to Troy, as if explaining herself.

“So I’ve heard,” said Troy. “Mum and Dad might keep you permanently.”

“What else?” asked Logan.

“In the bedroom,” said Savannah. She looked up at them. “The glory box at the end of the bed. It was my grandmother’s.” She winced. “It’s rather heavy.”

They went into the musty-smelling bedroom, the bed a tangle of sheets and blankets and pillows, clothes strewn over the floor.

“This must be it,” said Logan. He experimentally lifted one corner of the mahogany chest at the end of the bed.

“What the hell?” A bare-chested man sat upright from the tangle of sheets.

Troy’s heart leaped. He grabbed the nearest thing he could find from a bookshelf and held it up like a weapon. “Don’t fucking move!”

Logan dropped the chest with a bang. “Stop right there, mate,” he said, his demeanor as calm and controlled as a country cop, his voice as deep and slow as their father’s. People often said Troy and Logan sounded like their father, but this was the first time Troy had realized just how much Logan sounded and even looked like their dad.

The man scuttled backward up the bed until he was sitting with his back against the wall, his hands clutching the bedsheets. He was scrawny, pasty-white with lots of black chest hair, and he wore a pair of faded checked boxers with ripped elastic. Troy felt a revulsion so visceral it made him shudder.

“I’ve about a hundred in cash,” the man said. He reached over for a wallet on his bedside table and held it up. “T’at’s all.” He had an Irish accent. Troy’s first girlfriend once said there was nothing sexier than a man with an Irish accent, and Troy had been personally offended by the existence of Ireland ever since.

“We don’t want your money,” said Troy, disgusted.

“What the…?” Savannah appeared in the doorway.

“Savannah?” The man picked up a pair of glasses on his bedside table and put them on. Now he looked like Harry bloody Potter. How dare he look like Harry bloody Potter? Harry Potter would never hit a woman.

“Where have you been?” he said to Savannah, as if Logan and Troy weren’t in the room. “I’ve been out of my mind.”

“Why aren’t you at work?” said Savannah. Her eyes darted about the room. She looked terrified, and her terror ignited a flame of red-hot fury in Troy’s chest.

“I’m as sick as a dog,” said Harry Potter. He put his hand to his stomach, and a queasy expression crossed his face. “Dodgy sweet and sour.”

“Your car isn’t there,” said Savannah.

“It broke down on the motorway. In the rain. Everything has gone to shit.” His face twisted with remorse. “I’m so sorry, Savannah, my love. For that night. That was unforgivable, I know, but I wasn’t myself, I was upset about … But that’s no excuse, I know it’s no excuse…” He suddenly seemed to remember the presence of Logan and Troy. “Who are these guys?”

“They’re friends,” said Savannah coldly. “They’re helping me pick up my stuff.”

“Is there much else?” Logan asked her.

“Friends from where?” asked Harry Potter.

“It doesn’t matter where we’re from,” said Troy. “We’re just getting her stuff and getting out of here.”

Savannah grabbed a suitcase from the corner of the room, wheeled it over to the open built-in wardrobe, and began to fill it with clothes, chucking them in still on their coat hangers.

“But where are you going?” asked Harry Potter. “Where are you staying?” He made a move as if to get out of bed.

“Stay right where you are,” said Logan.

The guy looked panicked. “Savannah?”

“Don’t talk to her. Don’t say another fucking word.” Troy walked to the bed and loomed over the little fucker with the full might and power of his fit and healthy six-foot-four body. His nostrils twitched at the faint smells of vomit and sweat. “She doesn’t owe you an explanation.”

Troy was showered and clean and wearing a nine-hundred-dollar shirt and a Louis Moinet watch, and he might have made some bad choices in his life, and he might right now be facing an ethical dilemma of monumental proportions because of those unfortunate choices, but he had never hit a woman and he never would, he had inherited not a single one of his villainous grandfather’s villainous genes, and he liked the fear and confusion on Harry Potter’s face. Harry Potter deserved to feel fear and confusion, because he was legally, morally, and spiritually in the wrong.

It happened so rarely that you knew that you were right and the other guy was wrong; Troy was Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America. He was goddamned Batman.