Apples Never Fall

But Savannah sat, one hand wrapped tightly around the key on the chain at her neck, and watched the sky darken until the bats vanished into the inky blackness, and when she finally opened her mouth all she said was, “I think I’ll make a tomato and basil frittata for our dinner.”

A part of Joy was relieved. Savannah wasn’t her child. She didn’t want to know her secrets. She didn’t need to know.

When the twenty-one days were up and they said goodbye to their tiny house in the wilderness, Savannah drove them back to Sydney.

“What are you going to do now?” asked Joy.

“I might call my brother,” said Savannah. “Tell him I did his ‘challenge,’ for what it’s worth, and then I don’t know what I’ll do. Make another new life somewhere? What about you?”

“Oh,” said Joy, “I guess I’ll just go home.”

For the first time she understood what a privilege it was to be able to say that.

* * *

“Who cooked for you while I was gone?” Joy asked Stan once, when they were eating dinner.

“Caro sent over a horrible chewy lamb casserole. Brooke brought around some meals,” said Stan. “But I told her I could cook for myself. Not sure where this ‘Stan can’t boil an egg’ thing came from. I taught you to boil an egg.”

“You did not,” said Joy.

“I did so,” said Stan.

The memory floated to the surface of her mind, perfectly preserved, like an ancient artifact.

He did in fact teach her how to boil the perfect soft-boiled egg, and that was when he told her that as a kid he’d often had to cook for himself after his father left and his mother was “napping,” and Joy had been overcome with a girlish, sensual desire to feed her man, to nurture him like a real woman would, to mother him the way he hadn’t been mothered, and she’d kept him out of the kitchen, shooed him away until he stayed away, and as the years went by, cooking stopped feeling sensual and womanly and loving and became drudgery.

“Maybe we could take turns with the cooking,” she said. “During lockdown.”

“Sure,” said Stan.

“Careful what you wish for,” warned Debbie Christos, who still had bad memories of the year Dennis decided to become a Cordon Bleu chef and spent hours preparing distressing fiddly French dishes often involving innocent ducklings.

Stan wasn’t interested in ducklings, thank goodness, but it turned out he could cook a perfectly adequate roast dinner.

When he put the plate down in front of her, he’d set up his new phone to play “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” from 1974, when they were entirely different people, and also exactly the same.

“Haven’t I?” asked Joy.

“Nope,” said Stan.

* * *

Sometimes, at two a.m., it was always two a.m. for some reason, Joy would sit bolt upright in bed because a kind of horror had seeped into her dreams and she would find herself thinking about Stan in handcuffs, and the lines of coffins on the TV news, and Polly Perkins, who had not gone on to live happily ever after in New Zealand as Joy had always believed, but whose body had been discovered while Joy was away, and people had briefly thought it might have been Joy’s body, and she would find herself thinking about all the women who assumed their lives were just like hers, far too ordinary to end in newsworthy violence and yet they had, and all the ordinary people, just like her and Stan, who had been planning “active retirements” and whose lives were now ending cruelly, abruptly, and far too soon.

She tried the “techniques” suggested by Amy, who was handling lockdown far better than her friends, because they had never experienced the permanent low-level sense of existential dread that Amy had been experiencing since she was eight years old.

Eight! Joy wasn’t completely sure what existential dread was, but it sure didn’t sound good.

First, she tried Amy’s breathing exercises, but they always reminded her of being in labor, and as her labors had all been very aggressive and fast—those four children of hers barreling their way into the world—that wasn’t exactly relaxing.

Amy also suggested “practicing gratitude,” which was a technique where you listed all the things for which you were grateful, and Joy was good at that.

There were many things for which to be grateful. For example, Indira and Logan were not only back together but were also engaged. The ring was awful! But Indira seemed to like it, and the girls said Joy should absolutely not say a word about the ring’s awfulness, so she was keeping her lips zipped. She just hoped that one day, years from now, when their marriage went through a bad patch, Indira wouldn’t suddenly shout, “I’ve always hated this ring!” Joy could hardly bear to think of poor Logan’s hurt feelings if that happened. “Yeah, I think he’ll live, Mum,” said Troy.

Brooke’s clinic was still afloat, thank goodness, because physiotherapy was considered an essential service and Brooke said people were giving themselves dreadful injuries trying to do their own exercise routines at home and undertaking overly ambitious DIY projects, so that was great news.

Troy’s ex-wife, Claire, was pregnant with Troy’s baby, and because of the pandemic she had decided she wanted to make a life in Australia, and her Poor Husband had reluctantly agreed to move here. Troy had decided he wanted to share custody of his child, and Claire had agreed. The Poor Husband wasn’t too happy about that.