Apples Never Fall

She’d followed her mother’s instructions to the letter. If she gave those same instructions to her daughters they would have howled.

She only broke her mother’s rule once. It was late at night and she and Stan were in bed, the door shut, both still breathing heavily from sex.

“Why do you do that?” she’d whispered into his chest. “Disappear? Walk out?”

At first she’d thought he wasn’t going to answer, and then he finally spoke.

“I can’t talk about it,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

> “It’s okay,” she’d said, and it was okay, but it also wasn’t okay. There were tiny seeds of bitter resentment at the center of her heart, like the tiny bitter seeds at the center of even the sweetest apple.

They never talked of it again. When she said, “It’s okay,” she accepted the deal. He always came back, and it only happened maybe once, twice a year, and as his hair grayed and receded and eventually vanished, and his cartilage crumbled, he did it less and less, until one day she realized it was something from their past, like his long curly black hair, like her PMS.

“You have to make compromises in a relationship,” she said to Savannah. “You muddle along.” She stopped because she could see Savannah watching a woman and a little girl in a pale pink leotard and tutu who were sitting at the next table. The girl’s hair was pulled back in one of those ferociously smooth ballet buns.

“Cute,” she said to Savannah.

“I did classical ballet.” Savannah’s eyes were still on the child.

“Did you?” said Joy, with interest. In spite of Savannah having said that she had “highly superior autobiographical memory,” she hadn’t shared all that many of those memories that she remembered in such superior detail, presumably because they weren’t such good memories. It was nice to get a new concrete detail. It made sense too. Savannah had that beautiful straight-backed posture and a kind of grace to her movements.

“My mother would have loved me to do ballet. Did one of your foster carers get you into it?” asked Joy.

Savannah looked at her with unfocused eyes. “Huh?”

“The ballet?” said Joy. “How did you get into ballet?”

It didn’t seem like a typical pastime for a child shunted between foster homes, particularly “classical” ballet.

“Oh,” said Savannah. “I just did a few introductory lessons. That’s all.” She looked at the little girl and her lip curled. “She shouldn’t be eating a cupcake if she wants to be a ballerina. So much sugar!” She spat the words out through thin, pursed lips. She sounded once again like someone else. Joy wondered if she was unconsciously imitating some awful authority figure from her life.

Savannah pushed aside her apple crumble with contempt, as if someone had been forcing her to eat it. “I’ve had enough of this.”

“Yes. Me too,” said Joy. She sipped her tea and looked again at the little ballet dancer, her tan-stockinged legs kicking as she happily munched on her cupcake.

Joy felt all at once desolate, because she knew that Savannah had just lied to her about ballet, and Joy didn’t understand the lie, but if she was lying about that, then perhaps Joy’s children were right about Savannah, and she so didn’t want her children to be right about Savannah.

“Joy?” said a familiar voice, and Joy quickly rearranged her face into one of warm sympathy for her widowed friend Debbie Christos, who had walked into the café, which was disconcerting because Joy had moments earlier been thinking about her dainty wrists, and also about kissing her dead husband.

Chapter 31

NOW

“I actually met that girl the police want to talk to,” said Debbie Christos to her friend Sulin Ho. “I bumped into Joy at the David Jones cafeteria last year. They’d been out shopping. I remember thinking they looked like mother and daughter.”

“I heard about her, of course,” said Sulin. “But I never met her.”

Sulin was driving Debbie to Monday-night tennis, as she had done for the last month.

Losing one’s husband, like so many of life’s milestones, had turned out to be an interesting test of friendship. Debbie had lost friends, like the one who imperiously told her not to “wallow in her grief” when she didn’t want to go to the theater, and she’d deepened her friendship with others, like Sulin, who was not a widow, yet seemed to intuitively understand the way Debbie felt six months after losing Dennis: so raw and sensitive the very air was harsh against her skin.

Sulin hadn’t said, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, Debbie.”

She’d said, “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

When Debbie’s son delivered the eulogy at Dennis’s funeral, he said, “Dad died doing what he loved, just after he’d won the match at Friday-night tennis.”

Debbie wished he’d let her fact-check his speech. Dennis had won the point, not the game, and certainly not the match. They were playing against Joy and Stan, and no one beat the Delaneys. About twenty people listening to that eulogy would have thought, In your dreams, Dennis.