‘She was better than kids twice her age,’ said Joy.
‘They were all four better than kids twice their age,’ said Stan.
‘Wow,’ said Savannah. ‘A lot of talent in one family.’
No-one moved or said a word in response, but Joy felt a change in the mood of the room: like a slump or a sigh. It was as if her children were all inflated toys and they were slowly leaking air. What was wrong with them?
‘So I don’t know anything about tennis but I assume you all . . . played in, I don’t know, tournaments or whatever?’ said Savannah, as she used her fingers to remove another crumb from Amy’s brownie and put it on the tip of her tongue.
‘They were all in the top five players of the country at some point,’ said Stan.
‘That’s amazing,’ said Savannah.
‘In the juniors,’ Brooke quickly corrected her father. ‘Top five juniors.’
‘Still,’ said Savannah.
‘But none of us made it any further,’ said Amy. ‘We never quite got there.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ said Joy. ‘You all did extremely well!’ She was surprised and disappointed to find an intense wave of irritability sweep over her, washing away the wonderful sense of wellbeing she’d been experiencing since she woke up this morning. She could feel her bad mood like a physical sensation: an actual fever of aggravation heating up her face.
Amy raised a single eyebrow in a condescending manner. ‘I mean exactly that, Mum, we never quite got there, we all got close enough to make you think it was going to happen, and then one by one, we crashed and burned.’
This was technically true, in fact, it was distressingly accurate, but there was no need to say it in that hard, bitter tone. Joy and Stan had never revealed their disappointment to their children, only their pride. It was something they hadn’t even properly admitted to each other.
Joy remembered their trip to Wimbledon last year. Their first time. Their lifelong dream. They’d been giddy with anticipation. This was the point of their big trip: not seeing Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London or riding that overpriced London Eye. The point of the trip was Wimbledon. After all these years, they finally had the time and the money and they were there. Their kids and their friends had been texting: Send us photos!
She’d seen the moment it hit Stan: the realisation that they should never have come, not like this, not as ordinary fans, as ordinary people, because Stan had never really believed they were ordinary when it came to tennis. If he couldn’t play at Wimbledon then he should be there as the coach for one of his kids, and if not one of his kids, then one of his students, and if none of the above, then he should be watching from his armchair at home with his chilli crackers and cream cheese and his dog.
‘I don’t feel great,’ he had whispered, his face pasty-white. It was the men’s semifinals. The tickets had cost them six thousand dollars each. She thought: heart attack. Like poor Dennis Christos. He said, ‘You stay.’
But, of course, she didn’t send him off to have a heart attack on his own.
She’d dreamed of playing at Wimbledon too, and she’d dreamed of seeing one of her children or one of her students play at Wimbledon, and she’d dreamed, far more reasonably and feasibly, of one day being a spectator at Wimbledon, but her dreams didn’t have the same ferocious entitlement as Stan’s, because she was a woman, and women know that babies and husbands and sick parents can derail your dreams, at any moment they can drag you from your bed, they can forestall your career, they can lift you from your prized seat at Wimbledon from a match later described as ‘epic’。 She thought she’d need to call an ambulance or take him to a hospital. She was thinking about travel insurance and telling the children, and how would they transport his body home?
But it wasn’t a heart attack. He said it was something they ate. She didn’t believe it.
Joy watched the match on television, and sent fraudulent texts about how Wimbledon was wonderful, ‘like a dream’， ‘they couldn’t believe they were there’， while Stan lay curled on his side in their king-sized bed, his eyes closed, forehead creased, so much like Brooke with a migraine that Joy had wondered if she should do the same as she once did with Brooke and press her hand to his forehead, firmly, the way Brooke wanted, Harder, Mummy, harder, except it was never hard enough to make it go away.
Stan got up the next day and said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and couldn’t meet her eye.