He turned resolutely away from his memories and back to his father’s immaculate workbench.
Troy was a fool to think they could pay someone to come and do jobs around the house that their father had always done himself. Stan would find that demeaning, extravagant, unmanly. Logan had been in the car with his father once when they’d driven past a man in a suit standing on the side of the road casually scrolling through his phone while a roadside assistance guy was on his knees changing the tyre on the man’s Mercedes. Stan had been so offended by the sight he opened the window and roared, ‘Change your own tyre, ya big fucken’ pussy!’ Then he’d closed the window, grinned sheepishly, and said, ‘Don’t tell your mother.’
Logan wouldn’t let another man change a tyre for him but Troy sure as hell would, and he’d enjoy it too. He’d amiably chat to the guy while he did it. The last time they all got together, for Amy’s birthday, someone asked Troy what he’d done that day, and he said, without shame or embarrassment, ‘I had a pedicure.’ It turned out, to everyone’s amazement, that the bloke got regular pedicures. ‘Oh darling, I could have done your nails for free, saved you the money!’ their mother had said, as if Troy needed to save money, and then everyone briefly and unfairly lost their minds at the thought of their mother on her knees trimming Troy’s toenails, as if Troy had actually asked her to do it.
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 materialise 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 grey hoodie had a pink logo across the front.