Once, closing the bedroom door had been a signal that someone thought sex might be a good idea. Now it was a signal that they had a guest.
An unexpected guest.
Savannah was hopefully warm and comfortable in Amy’s old bedroom, wearing an old pair of Amy’s pyjamas. Amy, their eldest, their ‘free spirit’ as Joy liked to call her, their ‘problem child’ as Stan liked to call her, was turning forty next year, and she hadn’t officially lived at home for two decades, but she still used her old bedroom as a kind of permanent storage unit, because she never seemed to settle at one address long enough to properly relocate her possessions. It was admittedly strange behaviour for a nearly forty-year-old, and there had been a time when Joy and Stan had talked about putting their foot down, and friends had suggested they should do so, as if it were possible to use sheer force of will to mould Amy into a regular person. Amy was Amy, and right now she had a job and a phone number, her fingernails were generally clean and her hair （albeit currently dyed blue） did not look like it was crawling with lice, and that was all Joy wanted from her, although it would be nice if she combed her hair occasionally.
‘Is she in bed?’ asked Stan as he came out of the bathroom, wearing boxers and a V-necked white t-shirt, from which sprang white chest hair. He was still a big, muscly, overbearing man, but he always looked vulnerable to Joy in his pyjamas.
‘I think so,’ said Joy. ‘She seemed sleepy after her bath.’
She had insisted on running a bath for Savannah. The taps were tricky to manage. She’d added some of the peach-scented bubble bath someone had given her for Mother’s Day, and laid out two of the fluffiest guest towels she could find, and it had been so pleasing to see Savannah come out of the bathroom, pink-cheeked and yawning, the tips of her hair wet, Amy’s dressing-gown trailing on the floor behind her.
Joy could hear the rounded notes of contentment in her voice. It was the long-ago primal satisfaction of feeding and bathing a hungry, tired, compliant child, and then tucking that clean, pyjama-clad child straight into bed.
‘Amy’s dressing-gown was so long –’ Joy stopped. What the heck? Her mouth dropped.
‘Oh my word,’ she said. ‘You didn’t.’
A pile of random objects was crammed, higgledy-piggledy, on top of their chest of drawers: Stan’s ancient laptop that she was pretty sure was broken, her iPad that she never touched, their desktop computer, including the monitor, their ten-year-old television, a calculator, and an old jar of twenty-cent coins that probably had a total value of ten dollars, if that.
‘I’m just being cautious,’ said Stan defensively. ‘We don’t know anything about her. She could rob us blind in the night and we’d feel like real dickheads calling the police in the morning. “Oh yes, that’s right, Officer, we fed her dinner, ran her a bubble bath, put her to bed, and lo and behold, we woke up this morning and all our worldly possessions have gone.”’
‘I can’t believe you crept around the house unplugging all our worldly possessions.’ She ran her fingers over the snarl of dusty electrical cords that dangled off the chest of drawers.
Oh my Lord, there was his precious laminator, which Troy got him last Christmas, thus beginning Stan’s obsession with laminating anything he could find: instructions for using the TV remote （admittedly helpful）， the article in the local paper about the sale of Delaneys, inspiring sporting quotes he printed out from the internet and wanted to remember. He’d laminate Joy if he got the chance.
‘Wait, is that the DVD player? Stan. She wouldn’t take the DVD player. No-one uses DVD players anymore.’
‘We do,’ said Stan.
‘People her age don’t watch DVDs,’ said Joy. ‘They all stream.’
‘You don’t even know what streaming means,’ said Stan.
‘I do so,’ said Joy. She went into the bathroom to clean her teeth. ‘It’s just watching Netflix on TV, isn’t it? Isn’t that what streaming means?’
He had no right to pretend he had superior knowledge about technology. He was a man who didn’t own a mobile phone, as a matter of principle and stubborn pride. He loved it when people were shocked to discover he had never owned one, never would own one. He truly believed it made him morally superior, which drove Joy bananas because, excuse me, he was not. The way he talked about his ‘stance’ on mobile phones, you would think he were the lone person in the crowd not giving the Nazi salute.