‘Logan said he and Troy are helping this girl move out of her apartment tomorrow.’ Brooke was talking on the speaker phone as she drove home from work. It was irritating. Her voice kept fading in and out.
‘Yes, Logan insisted on it,’ said Joy. ‘He didn’t want your father doing it on his own. He and Troy are going to drive Savannah to her apartment tomorrow and move her out. Then she’ll never have anything to do with that vile man again.’
She moved into the living room, holding her cloth aloft, and started on the tennis ball collection. Stan owned forty-three signed tennis balls contained in small glass boxes, and it was amazing how the glass containers collected a thin layer of dust in such a short amount of time. When he died the signed balls would be the first thing to go. Some of them were probably fake. She’d read somewhere once that sports memorabilia fraud was booming.
‘What if the boyfriend turns up?’ asked Brooke.
‘It will be two against one,’ said Joy. ‘Your brothers can take care of it.’
‘What if he has a . . . I don’t know, a knife?’
Joy paused. Surely he wouldn’t have a knife! ‘Should they take knives too?’
‘Oh my God, Mum!’ Brooke exploded. Her excessive reaction calmed Joy. She wasn’t sending the boys into an active war zone. Savannah was quite positive that the boyfriend wouldn’t be there, and even if he was, Troy and Logan were very big, strong, intimidating men. Everyone said so. They’d be fine. She wouldn’t let them take knives. To be honest, part of her still didn’t trust the boys with knives, as if they were still little kids who might cut themselves or each other. She knew there was a very significant contradiction in her thinking right now.
‘He’s not going to be there,’ said Joy. ‘He’s a graphic designer, apparently. Like Indira. I wonder if Indira knows him? I guess that’s unlikely. Indira gave me a lovely new fridge magnet, did I tell you?’
She kept telling people about how much she loved the magnet to hide the fact that she couldn’t stand to look at it, because she’d been so crushed when she opened it. She’d been idiotically convinced it was an ultrasound picture and that Indira was hiding somewhere in the garden, watching her reaction. Mortifying.
‘No, Mum, you didn’t mention that Indira gave you a lovely fridge magnet,’ said Brooke. Joy recognised the tone. She used to speak to her own mother with the same forbearance.
‘Anyway, the boys will be fine,’ said Joy.
‘I can’t believe we need to get involved with these kinds of people,’ fretted Brooke.
‘These kinds of people?’ repeated Joy. ‘What do you mean, these kinds of people?’
Brooke had never, ever been snooty. Joy hadn’t brought her children up like that. Troy liked to strut about like a peacock, flicking his shiny black credit card onto the table at restaurants; ‘I’ll take care of this,’ he’d say, but it was funny when he did it.
‘Oh, you know what I mean, Mum,’ said Brooke.
‘No, I don’t know what you mean. You didn’t grow up in Downton Abbey, darling.’
‘It’s nothing to do with money or class. I just mean people where there might be a, I don’t know, a kind of, what’s the word, criminal element?’
‘We’ve got plenty of criminal elements in our family! Your own brother was a drug dealer!’
‘Troy just sold weed to the private school kids. You make him sound like a drug lord. He just, you know . . . saw a gap in the market.’
‘I can assure you that Savannah is a nice girl in a difficult situation,’ said Joy crisply.
‘I’m sure she is a nice girl, and it’s awful what happened to her, but she’s a stranger, and she’s not your responsibility. You’ve got enough on your plates!’ There was that new condescending tone that had begun to creep into Brooke’s voice ever since Stan had his knee operation, as if she were just weighed down with the onerous responsibility of taking care of her aging parents. It was sweet but also mildly aggravating.
‘What are you talking about? We’ve got nothing on our plates. Not a thing. Our plates are empty, darling.’
Joy hadn’t fully understood how bored she and Stan had been until Savannah arrived on their doorstep. Savannah gave Joy and Stan something interesting and new to talk about, and she was so sweet and grateful and pretty.
‘And Savannah isn’t a stranger anymore.’ Joy peered at Agassi’s scratchy ballpoint signature on the ball as she polished. ‘Every person you meet starts out as a stranger. Your father was a stranger when I first met him. You were a little stranger, when I first met you.’ She saw Brooke’s outraged little red face as the doctor held her up like an animal he’d rescued from a trap. Amazing to think that angry helpless baby was now this opinionated young woman.