Now that it was only ever her and Stan at home, cooking should feel like a breeze. She had whole days at her disposal to plan and prepare, to pore over recipe books if she chose, the way Savannah pored over her beloved recipe books （so many for a girl so young!） with such focus and pleasure, her mouth hanging slightly open as if she were reading a romance novel. Joy had time to wander about specialty supermarkets looking for unusual ingredients, except she wanted to cry with boredom at the thought. What was wrong with her? She thought of Brooke’s brisk, surprised suggestion that they try some sort of meal delivery service, or, if she wanted a housekeeper, hire one! According to her children, anything could be fixed online. They were always reaching for answers on their phones, they couldn’t go more than five minutes without looking something up. I’ll look it up, Mum. I’ve got it. I’ve booked it. I’ve ordered it. They tap-tap-tapped with their thumbs and it was done. There was no need for her elderly fuss.
‘I’ve been meaning to thank you for taking care of Stan while I was in hospital,’ said Joy now to Savannah. ‘I hope he wasn’t too grumpy? He can be grumpy.’
‘It was no trouble,’ said Savannah. Joy couldn’t read her face. Had he been grumpy with her? Or just odd? He could be strange, and young people weren’t patient with strangeness, they wanted clear-cut explanations for everything, including exactly why people behaved the way they did. They hadn’t yet learned that sometimes there were no answers.
‘My daughters would say that he shouldn’t need anyone to take care of him,’ said Joy. ‘But he’s from a different generation. No help in the kitchen at all.’ She paused, reflected. ‘He’s good at opening jars.’
She wondered how Debbie Christos was going without Dennis there to open jars. Debbie had dainty wrists. Joy should tell her to call Stan anytime she wanted a jar opened. Any time.
‘How is the apple crumble?’ asked Savannah, because she knew about the family’s quest to replicate Grandma’s apple crumble.
‘It’s a good one,’ said Joy. ‘But still missing something.’ She licked her spoon. ‘Actually, it’s not even close, to be honest. I don’t know why she could make such a good crumble. She couldn’t bake anything else. She was a nasty old drunk.’
Yet for some reason her apple crumble tasted of love. It was a mystery.
‘Maybe the secret ingredient is some kind of alcohol,’ said Savannah. ‘Whiskey?’
Joy pointed her spoon at her. ‘Now that would make sense. Clever.’
‘I’m going to try it this weekend,’ said Savannah, and Joy could see that she’d pleased her by calling her clever. ‘I’m going to crack the Delaney family apple crumble mystery.’
Joy watched Savannah touch her spoon with the tip of her tongue and put it down again. She didn’t really eat. All she did was cook. She was too thin. Joy wanted to tell her she was too thin but she’d learned that you had to be careful what you said. Amy and Brooke had once overheard Joy saying, ‘My daughters have enormous feet,’ and she’d never heard the end of it. She hadn’t meant anything bad by it! They did have enormous feet.
‘You don’t eat much, do you?’ she said to Savannah. Surely that wasn’t offensive. ‘For someone who loves to cook so much, I mean.’
‘I used to have a big appetite when I was a kid.’ Savannah dug her spoon into her apple crumble and swirled it around. Did she think Joy couldn’t tell that she wasn’t actually eating? ‘I was always hungry.’
She looked at Joy with a fixed, almost belligerent expression, and Joy backed down. Perhaps she’d accidentally ‘body-shamed’。 There were a lot of new rules for life and she hadn’t caught up on all of them. Her children, who had come into the world completely uncivilised and learned all their good manners from her, sometimes cried, ‘Mum! You can’t say that!’ She always laughed as if she didn’t give two hoots, but in truth these inadvertent transgressions upset and embarrassed her.
‘How long had you been going out with that boy?’ she asked Savannah. ‘The one who –’ She touched her own eyebrow where Savannah’s injury had been.
‘About a year.’ Savannah’s face was impassive. She scraped a spoonful of froth from her cappuccino.
‘Had he ever hurt you before?’
She wasn’t checking up on her story. Absolutely not. She was just asking questions, trying to understand her.