It was strange how very familiar it felt to Joy after all these decades; the wheel of time spun smoothly back, and her children were still her children, still looking to her to explain their father’s actions, to make them normal and acceptable. She could feel all those old phrases springing automatically to her lips. Don’t worry. He’ll be back. You know how he is. When your dad gets angry and upset he needs to get away and clear his head. It’s nothing to get upset about. Let’s go have ice cream!
“Is it true, Mum?” Logan spoke first. “Did you tell them to leave?”
“Oh,” said Joy distractedly. She was thinking about Stan. It was all very well when he was thirty and forty and even fifty, but he was too old to walk dramatically off into the night now he was seventy. He had medication to take. “Yes, well, that part actually is true. Don’t worry, he’ll get over it, but did any of you park in the driveway? Your father won’t be able to get his car out.” It was a cool night. He wasn’t dressed warmly enough. He was wearing jeans and slippers.
“Why would you do that to Dad?” Brooke asked Joy. Her eyes burned with the betrayal of her beloved father. “Dad was the one who discovered Harry. He should have been his coach. How could you take that away from him?”
“Who would have coached you? If your dad was traveling the international circuit with Harry?”
“You would have coached us,” said Brooke uncertainly.
“When? How?” If her children ever had children they might at least have an inkling of how Joy had staggered beneath the weight of her responsibilities through those difficult years.
“But it was Dad’s dream,” said Brooke. “You took away his dream.”
“What about your dreams?” Joy held out her hands to indicate all four of her children.
“It didn’t matter, we were never going to make it anyway,” said Brooke.
“But you didn’t know that back then!” cried Joy. “This is what you all forget. You all wanted it. You like to pretend you were doing it for us, but you damn well were not.” The fury rose within her chest. She knew her children better than they knew themselves, and she saw their childhoods so much more clearly than they could. “You all wanted it. I know you did. The sacrifices you all made.”
Her voice broke. She remembered the weeping blisters on Amy’s right palm (“It’s like she’s been doing manual labor!” said Joy’s mother, disgusted); the sad, complicated resignation on Logan’s face when he told Hien he’d have to miss his eighteenth birthday party because he’d be away competing in a tournament in Alice Springs; Troy at twelve, his cheek cushioned on the placemat at the dinner table where he’d fallen asleep while he waited for dessert; Brooke, tiny and determined on the court in her pajamas and sneakers, getting in some practice before breakfast.
The pain, the exhaustion, the relentless travel; the parties and dances and school events they all missed: what if her children had endured all that and then seen their father by another player’s side as he won the grand slam titles they’d all dreamed of winning?
It would have been unendurable.
Back then it was a choice between her children’s happiness and her husband’s dream, and she was a mother, so there was no choice, not really. She chose her children.
Remembering the day she’d done it was like remembering the day she’d committed a crime, a tiny crime without a weapon, as fast and simple as extinguishing the flame of a candle between her thumb and her finger: a fierce tingle of pain instantly gone.
She’d picked up the phone when no one was at home and called Harry’s dad, Elias Haddad. Elias was betting everything on his son’s tennis. He’d given up his job so he could be his manager. He was living on his savings.
Harry’s mother and sister did not figure in Joy’s thinking back then. They’d never existed for her.
“Elias, I need to tell you something in strictest confidence, something my husband would never tell you,” she’d said, and she spoke fast, without letting him speak, her eyes on a funny photo that sat on her desk of her sons, nose to nose, funny because they were glowering at each other like two boxers.
She’d always got on well with Elias. He was chatty and charming in that European way. She’d been able to convince him not to call the police when Troy attacked Harry. She said it would serve no purpose and take up Harry’s training time. She apologized profusely on Troy’s behalf. She pretended it was about jealousy and he seemed to accept that.
Now she said, “If you and Harry are serious about his tennis career, and I know you are, you need to leave Delaneys.”
“Leave you guys?” he said, and the surprise and alarm in his voice pulled her up short, but she barreled on.
“Yes, leave. Move to Melbourne. I’m going to give you the name of someone at Tennis Australia. Call her as soon as you put down the phone. She’s seen Harry play. He’ll get noticed. He’ll get the wild card entries at the Open. He’ll be anointed. He’ll become one of the chosen ones. It’s all about the politics, Elias.”
She and Stan had always told the children there were no such thing as the “chosen ones,” there were no favorites on the circuit, it didn’t matter where you lived, or who you knew, or who your parents knew, all that mattered was how you played—but there were politics in tennis. There were politics in everything.
“More importantly, he’ll get the kind of coaching he needs, the kind we can’t give him. We’d love to keep him, of course we would, and please don’t mention it to Stan, because I’m afraid my husband can’t be objective about this. He wants what’s best for Harry, but he also wants what’s best for himself, and that’s keeping Harry. But the truth is, Delaneys is holding him back, Elias, and I can’t sit here and let that happen to your son. It’s time to take the next step.”
She knew that Elias would instinctively understand who to charm and when, just as his son was able to strategize so brilliantly on the court. Elias might even have come to the decision to move Harry on from Delaneys himself if she hadn’t suggested it.
Elias did everything Joy told him to do, and he played it perfectly. He never said a word to Stan about Joy’s betrayal. He winked at Joy whenever he saw her, as if they’d enjoyed a secret tryst. It made her feel as if she had slept with him.
She later learned that Elias was a ladies’ man who often juggled multiple beautiful women, so keeping secrets came easily to him.
For a long time she’d assumed Stan would discover the truth, and she’d been ready for it, ready to defend herself, but he never did, and after a while she let her guilt (not regret, she never once regretted it) drift gently into nothingness like the tiny black curl of smoke from that snuffed candle.
She’d worried that Harry’s memoir might reveal her secret. It had never occurred to her that her houseguest, who had pretended so convincingly that she didn’t even recognize Harry’s name, would reveal it.