“I’m the one getting the bargain here,” said Joy stoutly. She thought of Brooke, on the phone this morning: “Mum, if you actually want to employ this girl as a housekeeper or whatever you want to call it, you need to do it properly.”
Of course Joy couldn’t employ Savannah as a full-time chef or housekeeper. She didn’t know anyone with a housekeeper. That was for movie stars and Americans. Possibly people from the eastern suburbs. Not for ordinary people like her and Stan. However, it had occurred to her last night that perhaps they could let Savannah stay as a kind of lodger. Why not? Savannah could get a job, somewhere local, and stay in Amy’s room, and pay nominal rent, or no rent at all if she kept on doing the cooking.
But Stan wasn’t at all keen. He said, when they were in bed last night, the door shut, that it had been over six weeks now and it was probably time for Savannah to think about finding her own place.
“But why the rush?” Joy had said, taken aback. She thought he enjoyed Savannah’s company as much as she did, but since she’d come back from the hospital, he’d become more reserved around Savannah. All that chattiness had stopped. He found excuses not to join them at mealtimes. He and Savannah didn’t seem to be watching that television series together anymore. It was such a pity.
“Did something happen while I was in hospital?” Joy had asked him.
“Like what?” said Stan, his jaw clenched.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You just don’t seem as happy about Savannah as you were in the beginning.”
“She’s been here long enough,” said Stan. “That’s all I’m saying.”
It had been so odd.
After a moment she’d said, “Have you been talking to the children?” The children were being such children about Savannah. She could not believe that Amy had accused Savannah of making up the story about her boyfriend, based on some documentary Logan had supposedly seen with a similar story, as if there couldn’t be similarities in people’s experiences.
Stan had said nothing, and she refused to give him the satisfaction of innocently, idiotically repeating the question, a little louder, the way she would have when she was twenty, or yelling, “Answer me!” like she would have when she was forty.
She was sure she was right: the children had got to him and that’s what accounted for his sudden coolness toward Savannah. He was more influenced by their opinions than he liked to pretend. He would argue vehemently with one of them about a particular issue and then, just a month or so later, spout the very same argument presented by one of the children as if it were his own, and categorically deny that he had ever said or thought otherwise.
It was all very well for Stan to say that Savannah had been there long enough. He wasn’t the one who would be back in the kitchen at five p.m. every day, staring with despair and boredom at the refrigerator’s contents, sliding the vegetable crisper open and closed, open and closed, hoping for inspiration.
This hatred of cooking must represent something else, because why get so worked up about it now, after all these years? Once upon a time Joy was up at five a.m. every day, she’d coach class after class, deal with the laundry, the dog, the accountant, the homework, her mother, her mother-in-law, and then she’d cook dinner for a family of six (at a minimum, there were always extra people at the table), and she’d done it without conscious resentment or complaint.
Now that it was only ever her and Stan at home, cooking should feel like a breeze. She had whole days at her disposal to plan and prepare, to pore over recipe books if she chose, the way Savannah pored over her beloved recipe books (so many for a girl so young
!) with such focus and pleasure, her mouth hanging slightly open as if she were reading a romance novel. Joy had time to wander about specialty supermarkets looking for unusual ingredients, except she wanted to cry with boredom at the thought. What was wrong with her? She thought of Brooke’s brisk, surprised suggestion that they try some sort of meal-delivery service, or, if she wanted a housekeeper, hire one! According to her children, anything could be fixed online. They were always reaching for answers on their phones, they couldn’t go more than five minutes without looking something up. I’ll look it up, Mum. I’ve got it. I’ve booked it. I’ve ordered it. They tap-tap-tapped with their thumbs and it was done. There was no need for her elderly fuss.
“I’ve been meaning to thank you for taking care of Stan while I was in hospital,” said Joy now to Savannah. “I hope he wasn’t too grumpy? He can be grumpy.”
“It was no trouble,” said Savannah. Joy couldn’t read her face. Had he been grumpy with her? Or just odd? He could be strange, and young people weren’t patient with strangeness, they wanted clear-cut explanations for everything, including exactly why people behaved the way they did. They hadn’t yet learned that sometimes there were no answers.
“My daughters would say that he shouldn’t need anyone to take care of him,” said Joy. “But he’s from a different generation. No help in the kitchen at all.” She paused, reflected. “He’s good at opening jars.”
She wondered how Debbie Christos was going without Dennis there to open jars. Debbie had dainty wrists. Joy should tell her to call Stan anytime she wanted a jar opened. Any time.
“How is the apple crumble?” asked Savannah, because she knew about the family’s quest to replicate Grandma’s apple crumble.
“It’s a good one,” said Joy. “But still missing something.” She licked her spoon. “Actually, it’s not even close, to be honest. I don’t know why she could make such a good crumble. She couldn’t bake anything else. She was a nasty old drunk.”
Yet for some reason her apple crumble tasted of love. It was a mystery.
“Maybe the secret ingredient is some kind of alcohol,” said Savannah. “Whiskey?”
Joy pointed her spoon at her. “Now that would make sense. Clever.”
“I’m going to try it this weekend,” said Savannah, and Joy could see that she’d pleased her by calling her clever. “I’m going to crack the De- laney family apple crumble mystery.”
Joy watched Savannah touch her spoon with the tip of her tongue and put it down again. She didn’t really eat. All she did was cook. She was too thin. Joy wanted to tell her she was too thin, but she’d learned that you had to be careful what you said. Amy and Brooke had once overheard Joy saying, “My daughters have enormous feet,” and she’d never heard the end of it. She hadn’t meant anything bad by it! They did have enormous feet.
“You don’t eat much, do you?” she said to Savannah. Surely that wasn’t offensive. “For someone who loves to cook so much, I mean.”
“I used to have a big appetite when I was a kid.” Savannah dug her spoon into her apple crumble and swirled it around. Did she think Joy couldn’t tell that she wasn’t actually eating? “I was always hungry.”
She looked at Joy with a fixed, almost belligerent expression, and Joy backed down. Perhaps she’d accidentally “body-shamed.” There were a lot of new rules for life, and she hadn’t caught up on all of them. Her children, who had come into the world completely uncivilized and learned all their good manners from her, sometimes cried, “Mum! You can’t say that!” She always laughed as if she didn’t give two hoots, but in truth these inadvertent transgressions upset and embarrassed her.