Apples Never Fall

“Not Mum. Her.” The cheaper-version brother put his elbows on the table and pressed his fingertips to his temples. “Savannah. Has anyone tried to get in contact with her?”

The waitress had no more excuses to linger and eavesdrop.

Was Savannah another sibling? Why wasn’t she here today? Was she the family outcast? The prodigal daughter? Is that why her name seemed to land between them with such portentousness? And had anyone called her?

The waitress walked to the counter, hit the bell with the flat of her hand, and slapped down their order.

Chapter 2

LAST SEPTEMBER

It was close to eleven on a chilly, breezy Tuesday night. Pale pink cherry blossoms skittered and whirled as the taxi drove slowly past renovated period homes, each with a midrange luxury sedan in the driveway and an orderly trio of different-colored trash cans at the curb. A ring-tailed possum scuttled across a sandstone fence, caught in the taxi’s headlights. A small dog yelped once and went quiet. The air smelled of wood smoke, cut grass, and slow-cooked lamb. Most of the houses were dark except for the vigilant winking of security cameras.

Joy Delaney, at number nine, packed her dishwasher while she listened to the latest episode of The Migraine Guy Podcast on the fancy new wireless headphones her son had given her for her birthday.

Joy was a tiny, trim, energetic woman with shiny shoulder-length white hair. She could never remember if she was sixty-eight or sixty-nine, and sometimes she even allowed the possibility that she was sixty-seven. (She was sixty-nine.) Right now she wore jeans and a black cardigan over a striped T-shirt, with woolly socks. She supposedly looked “great for her age.” Young people in shops often told her this. She always wanted to say, “You don’t know my age, you darling idiot, so how do you know I look great for it?”

Her husband, Stan Delaney, sat in his recliner in the living room, an ice pack on each knee, watching a documentary about the world’s greatest bridges while he worked his way through a packet of sweet chili crackers, dipping each one into a tub of cream cheese.

Their elderly Staffordshire terrier, Steffi (named after Steffi Graf, because as a puppy she’d been quick on her feet), sat on the kitchen floor next to Joy, chewing surreptitiously on a fragment of newspaper. Over the last year Steffi had begun obsessively chewing on any paper she could find in the house, which was apparently a psychological condition in dogs, possibly brought on by stress, although no one knew what Steffi had to be stressed about.

At least Steffi’s paper habit was more acceptable than that of her neighbor Caro’s cat, Otis, who had begun pilfering clothing from homes in the cul-de-sac, including, mortifyingly, underwear, which Caro was too embarrassed to return, except to Joy, of course.

Joy knew her giant headphones made her resemble an alien, but she didn’t care. After years of begging her children for quiet, she now couldn’t endure it. The silence howled through her so-called empty nest. Her nest had been empty for many years, so she should have been used to it, but last year they’d sold their business, and it felt like everything ended, juddered to a stop. In her search for noise, she’d become addicted to podcasts. Often she went to bed with her headphones still on so she could be rocked to sleep by the lullaby of a chatty, authoritative voice.

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She didn’t suffer from migraines herself, but her youngest daughter did, and Joy listened to The Migraine Guy Podcast both for informative tips she might be able to pass on to Brooke, and also as a kind of penance. Over recent years she had come to feel almost sick with regret for the dismissive, impatient way she’d first responded to Brooke’s childhood headaches, as they used to call them.

“Regret” can be my memoir’s theme, she thought, as she tried to shove the cheese grater into the dishwasher next to the frying pan. A Regretful Life, by Joy Delaney.

Last night she’d been to the first session of a “So You Want to Write a Memoir” course at the local evening college. Joy didn’t want to write a memoir but Caro did, so she was keeping her company. Caro was widowed and shy and didn’t want to go on her own. Joy would help Caro make a friend (she already had her eye on someone suitable) and then she’d drop out. Their teacher had explained that you began the process of writing a memoir by choosing a theme, and then it was simply a case of finding anecdotes to support the theme. “Maybe your theme is ‘I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks but look at me now,’” the teacher said, and all the ladies in their tailored pants and pearl earrings nodded solemnly and wrote wrong side of the tracks in their brand-new notebooks.

“Well, at least your memoir’s theme is obvious,” Caro told Joy on the way home.

“Is it?” said Joy.

“It’s tennis. Your theme is tennis.”

“That’s not a theme,” said Joy. “A theme is more like ‘revenge’ or ‘success against the odds’ or—”

“You could call it Game, Set, and Match: The Story of a Tennis Family.”

“But that’s … we’re not tennis stars,” said Joy. “We just ran a tennis school, and a local tennis club. We’re not the Williams family.” For some reason she found Caro’s comment annoying. Even upsetting.

Caro looked astonished. “What are you talking about? Tennis is your family’s passion. People are always saying, ‘Follow your passion!’ And I think to myself, Oh, if only I had a passion. Like Joy.”

Joy had changed the subject.

Now she looked up from the dishwasher and remembered Troy, as a young boy, standing right here in this very kitchen, racquet gripped like a weapon, face rosy with rage, his beautiful brown eyes full of blame and tears he would not let himself cry, shouting, “I hate tennis!”

“Ooh, sacrilege!” Amy had said, because her role as the oldest child was to narrate every family argument and use big words the other kids didn’t understand, while Brooke, still little and adorable, had burst into inevitable tears, and Logan’s face became blank and moronic.

“You don’t hate tennis,” Joy had told him. It was an order. She had meant: You can’t hate tennis, Troy. She’d meant: I don’t have the time or the strength to let you hate tennis.

Joy gave her head a little shake to dislodge the memory, and tried to return her attention to the podcast.

“… zigzag lines that float across your field of vision, shimmering spots or stars, people who have migraine aura symptoms say that…”