Apples Never Fall

Sleeping in my discarded

Bed

Wearing my discarded

Clothes

Making lasagna for my

Discarded

Mother

And my mother had to go

In the middle of my call

(I still had things to say)

Because the Strange Girl

Called out her name

In two syllables

As if she had the right

My mother’s name is Joy

And when she answered

The Strange Girl

Her voice was full of

Joy

Amy languidly drew thick rectangles over various words in her poem as if she were a wartime censor, tore out the page, crumpled it up, and ate it.

She didn’t specifically remember eating paper before but she must have, because the taste and texture was familiar. She chewed carefully, swallowed. If she was rating it at work, she would have said it was “pasty, bland, difficult to swallow, with a chemical aftertaste.”

Apparently Steffi, her parents’ dog, had developed a fetish for paper. There was a name for it. Her mother had told her all about it.

Ever since she’d retired, Amy’s mother brimmed with facts. She listened to podcasts, clicked on BuzzFeed articles, and googled. Then she called up her children and passed on all the new facts that she’d learned. It was interesting to observe her mother’s personality changing after retirement. She’d always been the busiest person Amy knew, impatient and distracted, and now she’d become so uncharacteristically reflective, willing to engage in very long, meandering conversations about topics she would have once deemed frivolous.

“Mum needs to do some kind of course to occupy her mind,” Brooke had said, sniffily.

“She’s doing a course. She’s learning how to write a memoir,” Amy told her. “Except she says she’s never going to write one.”

“Thank God,” said Brooke.

“I’d read it,” Amy had said.

Amy had always been interested in who her parents were before they became her parents: Joy Becker before she became Mum, Stan Delaney before he became Dad. Both Amy’s parents were only children with beautiful, complicated mothers: mothers who should never have become mothers. Her father’s mother had a scar that trailed down her wrinkled right cheek from where she’d been thrown across the room by Amy’s grandfather. Supposedly that was the first and only time Amy’s grandfather had hurt his wife, and Amy’s grandmother “immediately chucked him out” and “that was that,” but Amy thought there had to be more to the story. She’d given her father a book about a man who finally speaks about his troubled childhood to his oldest daughter in the hope that her dad might speak about his troubled childhood to his oldest daughter (her), but so far he “couldn’t make head or tail of it.”

“I don’t know why you thought Dad would suddenly start reading novels,” Brooke had said, pleased that Amy’s plan hadn’t worked, because she believed that Dad belonged to her. “Did you think he’d join a book club when he retired?”

Then they had both got the giggles imagining their huge taciturn father in a book club, chatting about character development over Chardonnay.