Apples Never Fall

“How did you know this?” she said to Savannah.

“My mother told me,” said Savannah. “Dad couldn’t send any child support money for about six months. He said it cost a lot to relocate to Melbourne, and my mother said, ‘Why are you doing that?’ And he said, ‘Joy Delaney said it was the right thing to do.’ I remember it word for word. Mum had to get a second job to help pay for my ballet lessons.”

“‘Joy Delaney said it was the right thing to do,’” repeated Amy. “Wow, Mum. That’s…” She shook her head. “Wow.”

After all these years, it was not Stan but their daughter looking at her with accusing eyes. She wanted to shout, But I did it for you! She tried to speak reasonably but she couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice. “I was not going to let you watch your father take some other kid to the top!”

“Better some other kid than no one at all,” said Logan. “Harry would have won more grand slam titles by now if he’d stayed with Dad. He’s never won a French Open title.”

“Harry never had the patience for clay,” said Joy querulously.

“Dad would have given him the patience. He’s never been as consistent as he should have been,” said Logan. “He needed Dad.”

“You needed him,” said Joy. “You all needed him.”

“No,” said Logan. “I didn’t.”

God almighty, she couldn’t make him see. He was looking at this from the perspective of the thirty-seven-year-old man who had left his tennis career behind, not the seventeen-year-old boy who still saw tennis in his future.

“Fine then, I needed him,” said Joy. “I had four children, all playing competitive tennis, and a business to run. I couldn’t do it on my own. You must remember what it was like.”

But she could see by their faces that they were blissfully oblivious to what it had been like.

She thought of a night when Troy had been playing all the way out at Homebush in a tournament that ran so far behind schedule he didn’t even get onto the court until midnight. Stan was with Troy, Joy was at home with the other kids. Logan was worryingly sick with a temperature. She didn’t sleep that night. She baked th

irty cupcakes for Brooke’s birthday the next day in between tending to Logan, she did three loads of laundry, she did the accounts, and she did Troy’s history assignment on the Great Wall of China. She got seven out of ten for the assignment (she was still furious about that; she’d deserved a nine). When she thought of that long night, it was like remembering an extraordinarily tough match where she’d prevailed. Except there was no trophy or applause. The only recognition you got for surviving a night like that came from other mothers. Only they understood the epic nature of your trivial achievements.

What had been the point of it all?

And yet, how could she have done any of it differently?

When it came to tennis at the level her children played, you were either in or you were out, and they wanted in. It would have been easier if they’d all been a little less talented, a little less driven, if they’d reached number one in the local district but gone no further.

“Anyway, might I remind you that you all hated Harry Haddad,” said Joy. “With a passion.” She glanced at Savannah, who had closed the lid of the wooden chest that contained all her secrets and was now sitting on top of it, as if she were waiting for a bus. “Sorry, Savannah, but they did hate your brother.”

“Oh, that’s okay, I hated him too,” said Savannah. “For years, whenever his face came on the television, I screamed.”

“You literally screamed?” said Amy with interest.

“I literally screamed,” said Savannah.

“I didn’t hate Harry,” said Logan. “I envied him, but I never hated him. I would have liked to have seen Dad keep coaching him.”

“That’s what you think now, Logan,” said Joy impatiently. “But when you were a teenager you thought very differently.”

“I hated him,” said Troy. He leaned against the wall, his head perilously close to the sharp corner of the framed print of a crying mermaid that had always hung in Amy’s room, which Joy found depressing but Amy loved. Troy blazed rage and venom straight at Savannah. “I think you did the right thing, Mum, because obviously these charming people have no problem cheating, lying, scamming—”

“Okay, that’s enough now,” said Joy.

“What? We need to show good manners to her?”

Troy had such passionate yet fluid convictions about justice and morality. His teenage drug-dealing empire was perfectly acceptable but Savannah’s scamming him for money was not; cheating at tennis was an unforgivable sin, but then he’d gone right ahead and cheated on his lovely wife.

“Look, if you’re going to get all worked up about it, I’ll transfer the money back to you,” said Savannah to Troy. “I just needed some cash to reestablish myself.” She sounded as if she were talking to a sibling about a loan she hadn’t repaid. Was this her way of admitting that she’d lied to Troy when she made those dreadful accusations about Stan? What if Troy had actually refused to pay up? What would she have done next?

Had Savannah understood the power of Joy’s secret she’d just shared? Would Joy have paid up if she’d attempted to blackmail her? Possibly.

Joy’s head spun. She couldn’t align Savannah the sly blackmailer with the Savannah who had nursed Joy so tenderly when she came home from the hospital.