Troy was the only Delaney to have ever experienced a pedicure. Their father would rather have pins stuck in his eyes, Joy had ticklish feet, Amy thought pedicures were elitist, and Brooke said they caused bacterial infections.
Troy didn’t care. Troy was his own man.
No one would ever call Troy passive, even though he was the one passively getting his toenails done like a fucking emperor.
“You didn’t even try to stop me,” Indira had said when she called from the airport.
“I thought this was what you wanted,” Logan said. She’d said “she couldn’t go on like this.” Like what? It was never made clear.
“But what do you want, Logan? You’re so bloody … passive!” She was crying as she spoke, crying so hard, and he was so confused, he didn’t understand what was going on. She was the one leaving the relationship, not him.
Then she’d hung up, so the word passive was the last word she’d said to him, and it kept echoing in his head until he’d become obsessed with it, examining the word and its implications from every angle. He’d even looked up the dictionary definition and now knew it by heart, occasionally muttering it to himself: Accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance.
What exactly was the problem with accepting and allowing what happens, or what others do? Wasn’t that a Zen, sensible way to lead your life? Apparently Indira’s last boyfriend had been “domineering.” Logan never domineered. He never stopped Indira from doing anything she wanted to do: even leaving, if that’s what she wanted, if that’s what made her happy. He wanted her to be happy.
So maybe no one could make Indira happy. He wasn’t going to demand she stay.
“You don’t want me enough,” she’d said at one point, maybe a week before she left, and he couldn’t speak because of the stomping sensation on his chest, and so he’d said nothing, just looked at her, until she sighed and walked away.
“You don’t want it enough, mate,” his father had said to him once on the way home in the car after Logan first lost a match to Harry fucking Haddad. Logan remembered sitting silently in the passenger seat, not saying a word, but thinking to himself: You’re wrong, Dad, you’re wrong, you’re wrong.
There was clearly something wrong with the way he communicated his own desires, which was ironic seeing as he taught communication skills.
I wanted it too much, Dad.
He put the gloves and the scraper in the bucket and hefted the ladder under one arm. He blinked in the sunlight as he left the darkness of the shed.
“Good morning,” said a female voice, and he nearly dropped the ladder. For a moment he thought it was Indira, as if he’d made her materialize just by thinking about her, but of course it wasn’t Indira.
A strange woman was sitting on the edge of his parents’ back veranda, her hands cupped around a mug of something hot, which she blew on as she looked up at him.
She had smooth, fair hair cut at sharp angles that swung either side of a skinny, ratty face. Her jeans were so long she’d had to fold them almost all the way to her knees. She wore UGG boots that looked a couple of sizes too big for her. They rolled loosely around on her feet like a child wearing grown-up shoes. Her gray hoodie had a pink logo across the front.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. She smoothed her hair back behind her ears, and two straight pieces swung free so the tips of her ears poked out.
“Who are you?” The fright made him as rude and brusque as his father.
“I’m Savannah.” She gave a little circular wave of her hand, as if she were being introduced while sitting at a table of his friends at a pub.
He studied her. A tiny jewel in her nose caught the sunlight. He felt a familiar childish sense of grievance he instantly tried to quash. This was the way it had always been: strangers strutting about his backyard with their racquets and designer shoes as if they owned the place, but you had to be polite and friendly because they paid the bills. Once, Brooke caught a kid going through her schoolbag that she’d dumped on the back veranda and helping herself to a banana that Brooke hadn’t eaten at recess.
“Who are you?” The girl imitated his tone, her head on one side.
“I’m Logan,” he said. He rested the ladder against his leg. “This is my parents’ house.” He tried not to sound childishly defensive, as if he needed to prove that he had far more right to be here than she did.
“Hi, Logan.”
He waited.
“I’m staying with your parents,” she said finally.
“Were you a student?” asked Logan.
“You mean tennis?” said Savannah. She smiled. “No. I’m not sporty.”
She put on an oddly genteel accent when she said sporty as if she were saying, I don’t eat caviar.
“So you’re…”
“Your parents have gone out to pick up new glasses for your dad,” said Savannah. “Bifocals. They were ready to be picked up yesterday but they ran out of time because the GP ran late for your mum’s appointment and then they got stuck in terrible traffic.”
Again, he couldn’t interpret the subtext. Why was she giving him all the detail? Was she mocking Logan’s mother, who weighed down every conversation with tangential detail? Her children were the only ones allowed to tease her about this.
“Well, nice to meet you,” said Logan. “I’ll get on with it.” If she didn’t want to say who she was, he didn’t care. He lifted the ladder. “I’m cleaning out the gutters.”
“Go for it,” said the girl grandly. She tipped her head back to enjoy the sunlight on her face.
Logan turned to walk toward the side of the house. He stopped and looked back at her. “How long are you staying for?”
“Indefinitely,” she said, without opening her eyes. She grinned.
He felt a jolt of surprise almost like fear. “Indefinitely?”
She opened her eyes and regarded him thoughtfully. “I was joking. I just meant I’d like to stay here forever. It’s so peaceful.” She inclined her chin at the tennis court. “I guess you all grew up to be tennis champions, then?”
“Not really.” Logan cleared his throat.
“You were pretty lucky to have a court in your backyard.”
He assumed her thin, harsh undertone related to money. These days only wealthy people had backyard tennis courts.
“Back in the sixties every single house in this street had a court,” he said, and he heard himself parroting his old man, except his father’s point was that the tragic disappearance of backyard tennis courts to make way for apartment blocks heralded the end of Australia’s golden age of tennis. It meant working-class kids like Stan no longer spent their childhoods whacking a tennis ball but hunched over tiny screens.
Logan’s point was: Don’t you dare think I grew up rich and privileged just because this bush neighborhood got gentrified.
Logan’s dad had grown up in this house, and they didn’t know much about his childhood, except that it wasn’t happy and he spent hours on his own, working on his serve on the tennis court his own father, Logan’s grandfather, had built before Logan’s grandmother “kicked him to the curb.” Whenever she said that, Logan used to visualize a humorous image, like a children’s book illustration, of a grandpa in a rocking chair, with a surprised open mouth, hands on his knees, flying through the air, but he assumed it hadn’t really been that comical at the time.
Before Logan was born, his grandmother moved in with her older sister to take care of her while she died, which she took an inconveniently long time to do. Apparently Grandma then sold this house to Logan’s parents at “a very cheap price.” It turned out to be an expensive price, though, because Logan’s mother then felt permanently beholden to her mother-in-law and she could never convince Logan’s dad to tear up the purple floral carpet in the living room because it would offend Grandma. Even after Grandma was long dead.
When the tennis school started making money, pretty good money thanks to Logan’s
mother’s entrepreneurial streak, the house was renovated and extended. The original dingy, dark little Federation bungalow became a light-filled family home, but the purple carpet remained, a constant point of contention. Joy looked away when she vacuumed it. The rest of the house was Logan’s mother’s preferred arts and crafts style. A lot of timber and copper. (“It’s like living in a bloody woodchopper’s house,” his father once said.)
“We were the only ones on the street who didn’t replace our tennis court with a swimming pool,” he told the girl, who saw only the respectable present, not the complicated past.
“Would you have preferred the pool then?” she asked, head on one side.
There were times when they all would have preferred the pool, especially back when it was a clay court and he and Troy had to spend hours maintaining the damned thing, watering it, rolling it.
She said, “At least your parents could walk out the back door and be at work, right? That must have made life easy.”
It meant that Delaneys Tennis Academy had swallowed up their lives.
“Yes, although when the tennis school really took off they leased four courts and the clubhouse around the corner. The place with the smiley tennis ball sign?”
He interrupted himself. She didn’t care about the smiley tennis ball. It seemed clear she wasn’t a previous student or a club member. If there wasn’t a tennis connection, then who the hell was she? “I’m sorry, but how do you know my parents?”
She scrunched up her face as if trying to remember the right answer.
“Are you a friend of Amy’s?” he guessed. She had to be.
“I’m wearing her clothes!” She lifted up one straight leg to show the too-long jeans. “She’s much taller than me.”
“We’re a tall family,” said Logan. He felt protective of Amy, as if this girl had made fun of her height. Amy was actually the shortest in the family.
“Except for your mother,” said Savannah. A bit of her hair got stuck in her mouth and she blew it away with an irritated puff. “Your mum and I are exactly the same height.” She removed an elastic band from her wrist and pulled her hair back into a ponytail with one practiced movement. “This hair is driving me crazy. I got it cut yesterday. It’s all smooth and slippery. Your mum got me an appointment with her hairdresser.”
“It looks nice,” said Logan automatically. He was well trained. Sisters.
“It cost a lot,” said Savannah. “Your mother paid, which was really nice of her.”
“Okay,” said Logan. Was she testing out his reaction to this information? He didn’t care if his mother wanted to pay for some girl’s haircut. He saw now that the hairstyle was very similar to his mother’s, as if her hairdresser worked from a template.
“You got the day off from work?” she said.
“I work odd hours,” he said.
“Drug dealer?”
He smiled tolerantly. “I teach at a community college.”
“What do you teach?”
“Business communications.” He waited for the inevitable reaction.
She raised her eyebrows. “I would have guessed you taught … I don’t know, some kind of trade, like house painting.”
He looked down at his pants. The yellow splashes were from when he and Indira had repainted their kitchen a sunny yellow that neither of them ended up liking. The blue splashes were from when he helped paint Brooke’s clinic. He couldn’t remember where the green flecks were from.
He’d actually done house painting for a couple of years after giving up tennis. Followed by plastering. Then roof tiling. “What about building as a career?” his dad had said hopefully, trying to parlay all these different jobs into something more substantial. He wouldn’t have minded if Logan had stuck with house painting, but he couldn’t stand the fact that Logan kept working for other people. Self-employment was the way to impress his father.
“What about a degree, darling?” his mother had said. Neither of his parents had degrees. His mother said the word degree with such respect and humility it broke his heart.
When Logan was seventeen he had turned down a tennis scholarship to an American university. He often wondered what his thinking had been. Was it because he knew his father didn’t see an American scholarship as a valid path to success in tennis? “If you want to make a career of tennis, then focus on your tennis, not study.” Or was it fear? A bit of social anxiety? He’d been an awkward teenager. He remembered thinking he wasn’t enthusiastic enough for America. He spoke too slowly. He was too Australian. Too much like his dad.
He did do a part-time communications degree eventually. God knows why he did that. But that degree was enough to get him this job teaching business communication skills, and it suited him. He had no special interest in the subject itself, but he enjoyed teaching. It was fine. A steady job with good hours. He actually thought he might do it forever.
“Do you enjoy your chosen profession?” asked Savannah. Was she laughing at him? Also, was she deliberately avoiding answering his question about how she knew his parents or had she just got distracted? He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of asking again.
“Sure,” he said. “Anyway. Better get on with it.”
“Do you want some help?” She slammed the mug down on the porcelain tiles next to her, and he winced because the mug was his mother’s favorite, the one that said, There’s no place like home: except Grandma’s!
“Careful with that mug,” he said. “It’s my mother’s favorite.”
Savannah picked up the mug with exaggerated care, stood up, and placed it on the center of the table where Logan’s father sat to do the crossword on Saturday mornings.
“Sorry,” she said. “I just grabbed it from the dishwasher.” She picked it up again and studied it. “No place like Grandma’s. Except your mother isn’t a grandma, is she?”
“It belonged to my grandmother,” said Logan. Troy had bought it for their mother’s mother as a Christmas gift, and she’d loved it. Of course she had. Troy was famous for buying the best gifts. Her love of the mug had been inexplicable because their mother’s mother had never been especially grandmotherly. Whenever they visited she was always keen for a departure time to be specified upfront.
The girl stepped off the veranda onto the grass and walked over to him. She stood a little too close, and Logan took a step back. Amy called people who did that “Space Invaders.” The Delaneys were not touchy-feely people. Except for their mother. She was a hugger, an arm-patter, a back-rubber, but Joy had always been the exception to the Delaney rule.
Savannah looked up at him with too much interest. Her eyelashes were long and white, like a small native animal’s. She had a pointed, freckled nose, thin, chapped lips, and a flesh-colored Band-Aid above one eyebrow. Logan was taller and bigger than most people, but this girl was so small and fragile-looking she made him feel enormous and foolish, as though he were dressed up as a football mascot.
“Do you want to have children?” She looked at him intensely. Was there something a little wrong with her?
“Maybe one day,” he said. He took another step back. “What happened there?” He indicated the Band-Aid.
“My boyfriend hit me,” she said, without inflection.
He thought her answer was going to be something mundane—in fact, he had no interest in the answer, he was just deflecting attention—and consequently, in his shock, he responded without thinking.
“Why?” The word was out of his mouth before he could drag it back. Why? It was like asking, What did you do to deserve that? His sisters would tear strips off him. Victim-blaming! “Sorry. That’s a stupid thing to ask.”
“It’s okay. So, he came home from work, when was it? Last Tuesday night.” She stuck her hands in the pockets of Amy’s jeans and circled the toe of her boot in the grass. “He was actually in a pretty good mood that day.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” said Logan. He held up a hand to try to stop her. He didn’t want details, for Christ’
s sake.
“It’s okay, I’m quite happy to tell you,” she said, and he’d asked the stupid question, so his punishment was to endure the painful answer.
“We were watching TV, just chilling out, and then this news story came on about domestic violence, right? I thought, Oh great, here we go. Those stories…” She shook her head. “I don’t know why they have to keep putting those stories on TV. It doesn’t help. It makes it worse!” Her voice skidded up.
Logan squinted, trying to make sense of what she was saying. Was she saying a story about violence against women inspired it?
“Those stories always put him in the filthiest of moods. Maybe they made him feel guilty, I don’t know. He’d say, ‘Oh, it’s always the man’s fault, isn’t it? Never the chick’s fault! Always his fault.’” She put on a deep, jocklike voice to imitate the boyfriend. Logan could almost see the guy. He knew the type.
“So anyway, I changed the channel as fast as I could, I was like, ‘Oh, I want to watch Survivor!’ and he didn’t say anything, and then I could feel it, he was just waiting for me to do something wrong, and the minutes went by, and I started to relax, and I thought, Oh it’s fine, and then, like an idiot, like a fool, I asked if he’d paid the car registration.” She shook her head at her own stupidity. “I wasn’t trying to make a point. I honestly wasn’t.” She looked up at Logan through her sandy eyelashes as if she were trying to convince him of her innocence. “I just said, ‘Did you remember to pay it?’”
“Sounds like a valid question to me,” said Logan. He’d never experienced physical violence in a relationship, but he knew how a question could be misinterpreted, how a simple request for information could be flung back in your face.
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