Apples Never Fall

She dropped the pendant and looked back at him steadily.

Troy’s heart stopped. “No.”

Her eyes held his, patiently, insistently, gently, like a doctor insisting you must understand that the cancer is incurable. “I’m sorry, but he did.”

“He didn’t actually—”

“He made a very specific request, which I refused.”

“You must have misunderstood,” said Troy.

“There was no doubt,” said Savannah. “I can give you his exact words if you like.”

Troy recoiled, held up his palm, tried to control his nausea.

“I was really upset,” said Savannah. “Because your parents seem so … happily married, and I really love your mother. I think she’s great. Truly. I thought your dad was great too.” She sighed, grimaced. “I’ve been at sixes and sevens trying to decide what to do.” She looked at the ceiling. “On the one hand I think she deserves to know the truth—”

“No,” said Troy. “I don’t think so.”

It was unbearable. He could not bear to imagine his mother’s pain, her shock, her shame. She would be so embarrassed.

How dare his father do this: his father who had spent Troy’s whole life sitting up there on his umpire’s chair, judging Troy’s every action.

“I don’t understand how you could lose control of yourself like that,” Stan had said after Troy jumped the net and attacked Harry for his flagrant cheating, propelled by white-hot rage. It was as though Troy had lost control of his bowels in public. “I just don’t understand it.” Troy had seen that same disgust each time he transgressed throughout his life, except there was never again disbelief, just resignation, as if it were to be expected now, as if once again Troy had proven himself to be exactly as disgusting as his father knew him to be.

“You’re a fool,” his father had said when Troy cheated on Claire. “She was too good for you.”

“I know,” Troy had said. That’s why I did it, Dad. Before she noticed.

His father’s betrayal felt like his own betrayal, as if he had been the one to make a move on Savannah. Hadn’t Troy just moments ago felt a faint flicker of desire for this girl? He might have acted on the very same desire his father had acted upon, as his young houseguest, young enough to be his daughter or even his granddaughter, walked past him in Troy’s family home. Did his father think Savannah would feel obliged? That he had some power over her because she had nowhere else to go? Because she’d already been knocked around by one guy? Did he forget that he was Stan Delaney, retired tennis coach in old-man slippers, not Harvey Weinstein in a bathrobe? Jesus Christ. Mum is too good for you, Dad.

Or did he think, No harm trying? Worth a shot? Because he didn’t get much these days? Oh, for fuck’s sake, now he was thinking about his parents having sex, and his father having sex with Savannah, and it was quite possible that Troy’s own sex life would be irretrievably damaged by this single moment.

Or was this just part of an ongoing pattern of behavior? Had his father cheated before? It had always been a possibility in the back of Troy’s mind that the reason for their father’s disappearances all those years ago was another woman or even another family.

“But it was always so random,” Amy said, the one and only time they discussed it, when they were both at the right level of drunkenness to bring up their father’s former habit. “So arbitrary.”

“Exactly,” said Troy. “It seemed arbitrary to us because he needed an excuse to see his girlfriend. We were walking on eggshells trying not to upset him when he’d already decided ahead of time that something stupid and meaningless was about to upset him.”

“That would be too cruel,” Amy had said.

“Well, it was cruel,” said Troy, and he’d been surprised and embarrassed by the break in his voice. “What he did was cruel.”

But all that had happened such a long time ago, when everything was different: their clothes, their hairstyles, their bodies, their personalities. If he saw old footage of himself he couldn’t believe he’d ever spoken at such a high pitch, or with such an uncouth, flat-voweled drawl. His parents were no longer those people. Now

they were smaller, weaker, less impressive, no longer in charge of anything, not even the tennis school. Once he’d run late meeting them for dinner, and when he got there his eyes skimmed right on past the elderly couple in the corner, and he’d kept looking for his parents, his huge intimidating father, his energetic tiny mother, and then he saw the elderly couple waving at him, dissolving into his parents, like that optical illusion where you saw either the old hag or the beautiful girl and once you knew the trick you could see both: it became a choice.

He could choose to see a vile old sleaze making a move on a young girl or a pathetic elderly man trying to reclaim his lost youth. He could choose to see the father who had chosen to believe Harry Haddad over him or he could choose to see the father who appeared like magic, huge and hairy in his boxer shorts, there to slay the monster, the moment Troy screamed “Daddy!” from his bed.

But then he grew out of his nightmares, and it was his mother who kept coming to his rescue after his dad gave up on him because of Harry fucking Haddad. It was his mother who charmed school principals and police officers. She was the one who helped get him back on the track that had led directly to this enviable life he now lived.

He had to ensure his mother never heard about what his father had done. He had to save her, the way his mother had always saved him, and in doing so he would give his father the pardon that he never gave Troy.

“You must not tell my mother,” said Troy.

“Like I said”—Savannah placed her hands on her knees—“I’m still trying to decide.”

And now he got it. Why she’d come to him and not one of his siblings, and why she was behaving like this was a business transaction.