She’d left behind literal blank spots too, like the faded rectangle on the wall where she’d hung that god-awful abstract painting she’d bought from an artist at the markets in Hobart, and the flattened carpet by the front door where her pointless vintage hat rack used to stand, except apparently it hadn’t been pointless because Logan kept going to chuck things on it, like his hoodie, and it kept right on not being there, its absence so surprisingly consistent, like the balls of dirty grey fluff that still floated disconsolately around the space in the laundry where Indira’s bamboo laundry hamper once stood.
She’d left behind her washing machine. It glared at him each time he attempted to use it. It was a small, fiddly front-loader with too many cycle options. Indira had done all their laundry. She loved laundry. She’d sometimes peeled socks off his feet just to wash them.
At least the fridge still liked him. He’d had it for years. It stayed, solemn and stolid, humming softly to itself through each relationship break-up as the tubs of Greek yoghurt and punnets of strawberries vanished, to be replaced once again by pizza boxes and multiple six-packs of beer.
Faithful old fridge.
For Christ’s sake, he was turning into his mother: personifying his appliances.
He stared at the blank rectangle on the wall, as if it were a bricked-up window and he was uselessly looking for a view that was long gone, for an explanation that was not forthcoming.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she used to say, about the god-awful painting. ‘It makes me feel alive.’
‘It’s god-awful,’ he would say, and he’d heard the echo of his parents in their banter, or he thought that’s what he heard. Maybe Indira heard something else. Her parents had an unhappy marriage. She might have heard the echoes of something entirely different. He thought he was being funny and flirty, but maybe she thought he was being nasty. Maybe she hated doing the laundry. Maybe they’d been living side by side in entirely different realities.
It was an awful painting, but he missed it, just like he missed her questions, her perfume, her insistence he eat bananas （for the potassium, she was obsessed with potassium）， her runners by the front door, her high-pitched sneezes, the unfathomable pleasure she took in capturing the Pokémon that apparently loitered invisibly throughout their apartment （were they still here? Waiting hopefully for her to capture them on her phone?）， her butterfly kisses on the back of his neck early on a Sunday morning, her – Jesus.
Enough.
He picked up his phone and called his friend Hien, because Logan was not fucking passive. He was keeping a daily inventory of his non-passive actions. He was the only one in his circle of old school friends who ever picked up the phone and all his friends’ wives noticed this and told their husbands, ‘You’re all so lucky you’ve got Logan.’
‘You thought about it yet?’ asked Hien as soon as he answered.
‘Eh?’ Logan hadn’t thought about anything. ‘Thought about what?’
But then he remembered that Hien believed his six-year-old son was the next Nadal, and he wanted Logan to coach him, and he didn’t care that Logan hadn’t coached since he was a teenager helping out at Delaneys. Logan had preferred coaching to all the other jobs they had to do but he didn’t need to do it now.
‘I told you already, I don’t coach,’ said Logan. ‘I gave you a list of names.’
‘Just see him play,’ said Hien. ‘Just once. I used to come to all your matches.’
‘You did not.’
‘I came to one,’ said Hien. ‘You were good.’
‘No shit, Sherlock,’ said Logan. ‘I ranked –’
‘Yeah, whatever, mate, I don’t care what you ranked, your time is done, but my kid is the future and he could be your future. You’ll see. You and Indira come for lunch, and then we’ll head down to the local courts and see what you think.’
‘Hien,’ said Logan.
‘I want you to coach him. No-one else. Not even your dad. I’m doing you a favour. You think about it. Gotta go.’
Logan tossed the phone aside on the couch and laughed a little. Even hard-nosed Hien had turned into a typical tennis parent, blinded by love for his kid.
Hien’s wife and Indira were good friends. But Indira must not have told her yet about the break-up.
His friends would react in the same way as his family had on Father’s Day. People liked Indira more than him. He’d always known this and this was the first time he’d cared. He felt unfairly maligned. Even bloody Troy had looked at him like he was a fool for letting her go.