Apples Never Fall

Day after day it went. Detailed listings of tiny portions of food. She flipped to the last page and saw the beginning of that day’s entry. All it said was: Eight spoonfuls of Chia Yogurt Pudding. Savannah had made the chia yogurt pudding last night. It was delicious. Joy must have had at least a hundred spoonfuls.

She closed the book and carefully placed it back in exactly the position she’d found it.

All that time Savannah spent creating beautiful food, and then she came back to her room and recorded every mouthful in bleak, rigid detail. The pleasure she’d given Joy and Stan with her cooking. It was almost humiliating how much pleasure Joy had taken in it, especially when contrasted with this disciplined transcription.

She sat on Savannah’s perfectly made bed and pressed her palms to the tightly pulled sheets. Oh, darling. What’s going on in that head of yours?

It wasn’t a surprise. Not really. She’d seen the way Savannah swirled the same spoonful of food around her plate, putting it down and picking it up again. Was she suffering from a full-blown eating disorder? Or was it just a strange, compulsive habit to record everything she ate that made her feel in control of her life?

Joy’s first instinct was to fix it: to get Savannah in to see a professional. As if that would be the silver bullet. It was exactly the way she’d felt when Amy was growing up. They would wait and wait, sometimes months, to get the next available appointment to see the next person. All those different diagnoses they were offered with varying degrees of confidence. She remembered that nice, tired-looking psychologist who, when Joy said, “You lot keep changing your mind!” replied, “Ours is not an exact science, Joy. It’s not like she has a headache.” Joy had thought, resentfully, Well, no one can bloody well fix headaches either!

“Where are you?” shouted Stan. She could hear his heavy footsteps pounding through the house.

“In Savannah’s room!” she called back.

“You mean Amy’s room,” he said, furiously, in the doorway.

“Amy doesn’t live here,” said Joy. She looked up at him. His face was white, his eyes red. He radiated fury.

“What is it?” she asked. “Who was on the phone?”

“It was Troy. Helpfully letting me know that he has just paid Savannah some exorbitant amount of money not to tell you that I harassed her.”

“You harassed her?” Joy looked at him blankly, trying to understand. Her first confused, irrational thought was that he’d harassed her to do tennis drills, like he’d once harassed the children.

&nbsp

; “Sexually harassed her,” said Stan. “Your idiotic son actually believed it. He genuinely believed it.”

Joy stood. She crossed her arms. “What happened?”

“Well, I didn’t bloody well sexually harass her if that’s what you’re asking!”

“Oh, of course you didn’t,” sighed Joy.

Neither of them had been perfect. There had been parties. It was the seventies. They didn’t exactly embrace the free love movement, but there was flirting. She was reasonably sure that Brooke once caught her kissing Dennis Christos at the Delaneys’ Christmas party in the clubhouse kitchen after too many glasses of punch. Dennis couldn’t serve to save his life, but the man could kiss. Joy confessed it to Stan years later, and he certainly wasn’t thrilled, but he didn’t make a big deal of it, although poor old Dennis did start to look alarmed at the speed of Stan’s serves.

Stan might have strayed. It was reasonable to think that he might have considered it in the bad year when they truly thought they were going to separate. Women found him attractive. Joy had never asked the question because she didn’t care to hear the answer. She knew it was possible to be kissed by another man and for it to mean nothing at all except that she’d put too much gin in the punch and Dennis was an outrageous flirt, although she still never doubted his love for Debbie.

There were worse betrayals.

But there was no way in the world Stan would have been inappropriate with Savannah. He had always been hyperaware of the propriety of his position when it came to children and young girls. Joy had seen the way he interacted with Savannah. He saw her as a daughter or a student.

“Did Savannah misinterpret something you said?” Joy asked him. It could have happened when she wasn’t there to smooth things over and explain to Savannah what her clueless husband really meant. “Did you try to make a joke? Because these days you have to be so careful—”

“For Christ’s sake, I didn’t try to make a joke,” said Stan. “If you must know, while you were in hospital, she gave me certain signals—”

“What?” Joy guffawed. “Darling, she didn’t, she wouldn’t. You misunderstood.”

“I don’t think so.” He pressed his lips together in the way he did when Joy served tuna casserole, the smell of which supposedly made him feel sick, so she only made it when she wasn’t happy with him. “I don’t think I misinterpreted anything. Not now she’s done this. Not now she’s taken Troy’s money.”

Joy looked around the neat room, at the book on Amy’s desk full of her tiny inscriptions about food. She had no idea who this person was. Her heart quickened. She’d opened her home to a stranger.

“Tell me.” She cleared her throat. “Tell me what happened.”

“It was subtle,” said Stan. “So subtle that at first I thought I was imagining it. Just, you know … eye contact, and a hand on my arm, and there was one day she came into the kitchen straight from the shower wearing nothing but a towel and she kept talking to me and I didn’t know which way to look, and I thought, Well, the girls always used to walk around in towels…”

“They’re your daughters!”