Would today be okay? She felt strangely nervous about it.
Of course, the boys had already met Savannah when they helped her pick up her things, and that had all gone fine, although it turned out the ex-boyfriend had been there, but he hadn’t given them any trouble and everyone’s limbs were intact.
Perhaps Savannah and the girls would become friends? Probably not Brooke. She was so busy with the clinic and she could be stand-offish. On the other hand, Amy collected new friends of all ages, wherever she went. She once made such good friends with her Uber driver that the driver parked her car and joined Amy and her other friends on their night out, and it was all thanks to this nice Uber girl that Amy had found her current share house!
Maybe Savannah could move into Amy’s share house if another room became available?
Although, frankly, Joy was in no hurry to have her move out.
Joy stopped bobbing, rinsed off the conditioner and gave herself a final blast of freezing cold water, which supposedly caused her stem cells to form brown fat instead of white fat, and brown fat was good, apparently.
She would ask Brooke about brown fat today, and Brooke would probably laugh at her and say she’d got it all wrong. Joy tried to make Brooke feel clever and medically qualified as often as possible. Brooke was clever and medically qualified, just desperately in need of approval, and desperately trying to hide the desire so naked on her darling frowny face. If only she’d wear a little lipstick.
Joy dried herself briskly. Goodness, she really did feel nervous.
Was she worried the children would notice the misalignment between the good-humoured, loving selves she and Stan were portraying to Savannah, and their true selves? The ones they’d grown up with? But come on now, they were happily married, for the most part, and they were good-humoured and loving, or Joy was, anyway.
All four of her children each fervently believed in separate versions of their childhoods that often didn’t match up with Joy’s memories, or each other’s, for that matter. Sometimes one of them would tell a story about an incident that Joy was positive never happened, or at least not in the way they described it, because she had biographical facts at her disposal: ‘But we weren’t even living in the Fairmont Street house then!’ ‘But your grandmother wasn’t alive when you turned thirteen!’ And sometimes they’d argue about which of them was the villain or the victim, the martyr or the hero. ‘That wasn’t you that got stung by the bee, helping Grandma after she fainted at Troy’s party, it was me!’ And Joy would think, It was Logan’s party, not Troy’s, and there was no bee, it was a wasp, and no-one got stung, Amy just thought she did, and none of you helped, and Grandma didn’t faint, she passed out drunk.
Her children refused to be corrected. That’s what they remembered, therefore that was what happened, and when their memories didn’t match up with each other’s, they held on tight to their versions of the stories, as stubborn as their damned father.
Although sometimes one of them would get a far-off look, and you’d see something click into place, and they’d re-examine a childhood event with grown-up eyes and say: ‘Wait a minute, maybe Grandma was drunk that day?’
Joy put on her dressing-gown to go into the kitchen. For the first few days Savannah was staying Joy had made sure she was fully dressed before she left her room each morning, but it was funny how quickly she’d begun to feel relaxed around her. Most house guests, no matter how pleasant, gave you a sense of something being out of place, so that you only relaxed fully when they were gone, but Savannah had slotted into their home so seamlessly.
Joy noticed that Savannah never closed her bedroom door at night. Not even a little bit. She went to bed with the door wide open, so that if Joy went to bed later than Savannah it was like walking by the bedroom of a small sleeping child. ‘Good night!’ she’d call out, if Savannah had the bedside lamp on. ‘Good night, Joy!’ Savannah would call back cheerfully. ‘Sleep tight!’
It came to Joy with sick clarity that the poor child had probably learned the art of fitting in when she was growing up. She hadn’t said all that much about her childhood but she had told Joy that she’d grown up in the foster system. She said some of her foster homes were great, fantastic! But some were not so great. She’d been moved many times because there were relatives who agreed to take her on but then it didn’t work out, or they changed their mind. She said that to be honest, those were the living situations that were not so great. Savannah didn’t know anything about her biological parents, although she vaguely remembered some supervised visits with her biological mother, but those had stopped when she was very young, and now she had no idea, and not much interest, as to the woman’s whereabouts.