‘But it was always so random,’ Amy said, the one and only time they discussed it, when they were both at the right level of drunkenness to bring up their father’s former habit. ‘So arbitrary.’
‘Exactly,’ said Troy. ‘It seemed arbitrary to us because he needed an excuse to see his girlfriend. We were walking on eggshells trying not to upset him when he’d already decided ahead of time that something stupid and meaningless was about to upset him.’
‘That would be too cruel,’ Amy had said.
‘Well, it was cruel,’ said Troy, and he’d been surprised and embarrassed by the break in his voice. ‘What he did was cruel.’
But all that had happened such a long time ago, when everything was different: their clothes, their hairstyles, their bodies, their personalities. If he saw old footage of himself he couldn’t believe he’d ever spoken at such a high pitch, or with such an uncouth flat-vowelled drawl. His parents were no longer those people. Now they were smaller, weaker, less impressive, no longer in charge of anything, not even the tennis school. Once he’d run late meeting them for dinner and when he got there his eyes skimmed right on past the elderly couple in the corner, and he’d kept looking for his parents, his huge intimidating father, his energetic tiny mother, and then he saw the elderly couple waving at him, dissolving into his parents, like that optical illusion where you saw either the old hag or the beautiful girl and once you knew the trick you could see both: it became a choice.
He could choose to see a vile old sleaze making a move on a young girl or a pathetic elderly man trying to reclaim his lost youth. He could choose to see the father who had chosen to believe Harry Haddad over him or he could choose to see the father who appeared like magic, huge and hairy in his boxer shorts, there to slay the monster, the moment Troy screamed ‘Daddy!’ from his bed.
But then he grew out of his nightmares, and it was his mother who kept coming to his rescue after his dad gave up on him because of Harry fucking Haddad. It was his mother who charmed school principals and police officers. She was the one who helped get him back on the track that had led directly to this enviable life he now lived.
He had to ensure his mother never heard about what his father had done. He had to save her, the way his mother had always saved him, and in doing so he would give his father the pardon that he never gave Troy.
‘You must not tell my mother,’ said Troy.
‘Like I said,’ Savannah placed her hands on her knees, ‘I’m still trying to decide.’
And now he got it. Why she’d come to him and not one of his siblings, and why she was behaving like this was a business transaction.
She was here to make a deal.
chapter thirty-four
‘Who can explain the difference between active and passive listening?’ Logan asked his Wednesday afternoon class.
Passive listening: that word again. Was that the way he’d listened to Indira? Passively?
A motley mix of students sat at the semicircle of desks surrounding him: teenagers straight out of school, women looking to get back into an unrecognisable workforce after years spent raising children, older men who had worked all their lives in industries that no longer existed.
‘Active listening is the way I listen to my husband,’ said star student Rani. ‘Passive listening is the way he listens to me.’
A few women chuckled. The teenagers glanced up briefly from their phones and then instantly dropped their heads again as if there were magnets on their foreheads.
Rani was only a few years younger than Logan’s mother, and she was retraining to get back into the workforce after she and her husband had lost all their money to a charming, fraudulent financial adviser now doing prison time.
‘We thought this man was the bee’s knees,’ Rani had said in her ‘about me’ presentation at the beginning of the semester. ‘We mortgaged our home to invest with him. It was like we were under his spell.’
Rani’s sparkly demeanour reminded Logan of his mother and Logan wondered now if Joy might one day describe Savannah as someone they once thought of as ‘the bee’s knees’。 His mother was spellbound by her, or at least by her cooking, but Joy was astute when it came to money. There was no way she’d mortgage the house for Savannah. Or would she? In return for a roast chicken lunch?
As Logan’s class brainstormed techniques for active listening （verbal affirmations like ‘Yes, I see’ and non-verbal affirmations like nodding your head） he thought about how Amy had said their mother was furious when she heard of Logan’s doubts about Savannah’s story. Logan was kind of furious with Amy. Telling their mother was not the plan.