But walking out the door was never a real option. She was too necessary. Only she knew the children’s schedules, where everything was, the vet’s name, the doctor’s name, the teacher’s name.
But Stan could walk out without a moment’s thought. Sometimes he simply left the room and that was fine. Normal people did that. Sometimes he walked around the block and perhaps normal people did that too. Sometimes he went for a drive and came back an hour later. Two hours later. Three. Four. The longer he went, the less normal it became. The longest time was five days.
‘Here’s what you do,’ Joy’s mother said when Joy finally confided in her about her husband’s strange, shameful habit. ‘Make sure you’re wearing lipstick and your nicest dress when he walks back in the door. Don’t cry. Don’t shout. Don’t ask a single question about where he’s been. Hold your head up high, and act as if you didn’t even notice he was gone.’
She’d followed her mother’s instructions to the letter. If she gave those same instructions to her daughters they would have howled.
She only broke her mother’s rule once. It was late at night and she and Stan were in bed, the door shut, both still breathing heavily from sex.
‘Why do you do that?’ she’d whispered into his chest. ‘Disappear? Walk out?’
At first she’d thought he wasn’t going to answer, and then he finally spoke.
‘I can’t talk about it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay,’ she’d said, and it was okay, but it also wasn’t okay. There were tiny seeds of bitter resentment at the centre of her heart, like the tiny bitter seeds at the centre of even the sweetest apple.
They never talked of it again. When she said, ‘It’s okay,’ she accepted the deal. He always came back, and it only happened maybe once, twice a year, and as his hair greyed and receded and eventually vanished, and his cartilage crumbled, he did it less and less, until one day she realised it was something from their past, like his long curly black hair, like her PMT.
‘You have to make compromises in a relationship,’ she said to Savannah. ‘You muddle along.’ She stopped because she could see Savannah watching a woman and a little girl in a pale pink leotard and tutu who were sitting at the next table. The girl’s hair was pulled back in one of those ferociously smooth ballet buns.
‘Cute,’ she said to Savannah.
‘I did classical ballet.’ Savannah’s eyes were still on the child.
‘Did you?’ said Joy, with interest. In spite of Savannah having said that she had ‘highly superior autobiographical memory’， she hadn’t shared all that many of those memories that she remembered in such superior detail, presumably because they weren’t such good memories. It was nice to get a new concrete detail. It made sense too. Savannah had that beautiful straight-backed posture and a kind of grace to her movements.
‘My mother would have loved me to do ballet. Did one of your foster carers get you into it?’ asked Joy.
Savannah looked at her with unfocused eyes. ‘Huh?’
‘The ballet?’ said Joy. ‘How did you get into ballet?’
It didn’t seem like a typical pastime for a child shunted between foster homes, particularly ‘classical’ ballet.
‘Oh,’ said Savannah. ‘I just did a few introductory lessons. That’s all.’ She looked at the little girl and her lip curled. ‘She shouldn’t be eating a cupcake if she wants to be a ballerina. So much sugar!’ She spat the words out through thin, pursed lips. She sounded once again like someone else. Joy wondered if she were unconsciously imitating some awful authority figure from her life.
Savannah pushed aside her apple crumble with contempt, as if someone had been forcing her to eat it. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’
‘Yes. Me too,’ said Joy. She sipped her tea and looked again at the little ballet dancer, her tan-stockinged legs kicking as she happily munched on her cupcake.
Joy felt all at once desolate, because she knew that Savannah had just lied to her about ballet, and Joy didn’t understand the lie, but if she was lying about that, then perhaps Joy’s children were right about Savannah, and she so didn’t want her children to be right about Savannah.
‘Joy?’ said a familiar voice, and Joy quickly rearranged her face into one of warm sympathy for her widowed friend Debbie Christos, who had walked into the café, which was disconcerting because Joy had moments earlier been thinking about her dainty wrists, and also about kissing her dead husband.