Apples Never Fall

“Stop calling him the Poor Husband

, Mum,” said her children with blithe partisan cruelty. “It’s Troy’s biological child.”

(Joy’s first grandchild was due Christmas Eve. That son of hers always did give the very best gifts.)

Joy hadn’t met the Poor Husband yet, but she was going to be particularly nice to him when she did, because she had a terrible secret suspicion.

She remembered one particular match when Troy was playing against his nemesis, Harry Haddad, and Harry sent a crosscourt shot so impossibly wide any other player would have let it go, but Troy went for it. He had to run almost onto the next court, but he not only made that impossible shot, he also won that impossible point, and the small crowd of spectators whooped like they’d gone down a roller coaster. Even Harry grudgingly clapped one hand against his strings.

Troy always went for the impossible shots.

Well, Claire wasn’t a tennis ball.

She was a sensible, intelligent girl who would make her own life choices, and if Troy did somehow charm her out of her marriage, it wouldn’t be Joy’s fault, would it?

There was nothing Joy could do to change the outcome of her children’s lives, any more than she could have changed the outcome of their matches, no matter how hard she bit her lip, which she used to do, sometimes until it bled, or how much Stan muttered instructions they couldn’t hear.

Sometimes their children would do everything exactly as they’d taught them, and sometimes they would do all the things they’d told them not to do, and seeing them suffer the tiniest disappointments would be more painful than their own most significant losses, but then other times they would do something so extraordinary, so unexpected and beautiful, so entirely of their own choice and their own making, it was like a splash of icy water on a hot day.

Those were the glorious moments.

That’s how she finally made herself fall back to sleep: by remembering all the glorious moments, one after the other after the other, her children’s ecstatic faces looking for their parents in the stands, looking for their approval, looking for their love, knowing it was there, knowing—she hoped they knew this—that it would always be there, even long after she and Stan were gone, because love like that was infinite.

Chapter 69

At first Brooke thought she imagined the sweet fragrance that drifted like a memory into her consciousness as she cleaned her exercise equipment with antibacterial spray.

She was cleaning with even more desperate vigor than usual because her last patient had mentioned, at the very end of his session, that he’d woken with a sore throat this morning “but he was pretty sure it wasn’t COVID.” Then he’d coughed. Straight in her face.

People were idiots. People were heroes—she had friends working in intensive care units right now, facing far more than the occasional head-on cough—but people were idiots. She had learned, when her mother was missing, that it was possible to simultaneously hold antithetical beliefs. She had existed in the center of a Venn diagram. She loved her father. She loved her mother. If her father had been responsible for her mother’s death, she would have stood by him. She knew she was the only one of her siblings who had stared directly at the solar eclipse of this possibility. Troy thought he had faced it, but he had only done so by pretending that he didn’t love their father.

It was not that Brooke loved her father more, or that she loved her mother less. The body could find balance between opposing forces. The mind could do the same.

She could see her decade with Grant as a failure, or she could see it as a success. It was a relatively short marriage that was now ending in a mildly acrimonious divorce. It was also a long-term relationship with many happy memories that ended exactly when it should have ended.

She sniffed. What was the smell? It was so familiar. So obvious. And yet obviously not obvious, because she couldn’t put a name to it. She studied the label on the bottle. It was the same brand she always used, but overlaid with the comforting antiseptic smell was something else: like baking.

Was it the café next door? They were only doing takeaway coffees now. No table service. It was sad to see the tables and chairs piled up on top of each other gathering dust in the corner and the red masking-tape crosses on the floor to keep everyone apart.

“Hey, did you guys ever find your mother?” one of the young waitresses asked Brooke just this morning as she handed over her coffee.

“We did,” said Brooke. “She’s fine. She’s good. Great, in fact.”

There had only been a small paragraph in the newspaper about Joy’s return. There was a touch of chagrin in the tone of the reporting. People didn’t want the old lady to be dead, but it was kind of disappointing that she was alive.

“Oh, I’m so happy to hear that!” The waitress’s eyes sparkled above her mask, entirely disproving Brooke’s theory. “It’s so great to hear some good news for a change. Stay safe!”

“Thank you,” said Brooke. People were awful. People were wonderful. “You stay safe too.”

Brooke was a self-employed single woman living through a pandemic. She couldn’t date. She couldn’t play basketball. She couldn’t go out to dinner with friends. Instead there were drinks over Zoom and sudden, intense, beautiful moments of human connection like this (although also awkward: were they going to say “Stay safe!” to each other every single day now?).

No, she was not imagining that smell. It was from childhood. Like cut grass. It was normally accompanied by cigarette smoke and Chanel N°5.

She put down her spray and walked out to the reception area like she was in a dream, and there it was, sitting on top of her desk.

An apple crumble. Still warm from the oven. Like it had come from another dimension. From heaven or hell or the past. It was wrapped tightly in aluminum foil. There was a sheet of handwritten paper sticky-taped to the foil. The writing was neat and childlike. There was no heading. It began: Four medium apples, peeled, cored, and diced.

She opened the door of her office to look outside but saw no one except for a masked elderly lady pushing a shopping trolley and frowning ferociously in Brooke’s direction, as if daring her to approach.