Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

Her nest had been empty for many years, so she should have been used to it, but last year they’d sold their business, and it felt like everything ended, juddered to a stop.

You can’t hate tennis, Troy. She’d meant: I don’t have the time or the strength to let you hate tennis.

Her past kept bumping up against her present lately.

Her friend Linda, who worked at a nursing home, said a wave of restlessness swept through the place at school pickup time each day as the elderly ladies became agitated, convinced they should be rushing to collect long-since-grown children.

“It’s possible my superior intellect is masking my dementia symptoms,”

his sons had informed him that seventy was too old to climb ladders, so he liked to find excuses to climb them as often as possible.

She’d heard that retirement caused a rapid decline in brain function. Maybe that’s what was going on here. Her frontal lobe was atrophying.

she couldn’t bear to hear criticism of her children, especially when that criticism was valid.

The truth was, she and Stan weren’t suited to retirement.

she had got it into her head that she and Stan would take the children on a lovely picnic, and she’d tried so hard to pretend they were a lovely picnicking family, but something inevitably went wrong, there was always someone in a bad mood, or they got lost, or it rained just as they arrived, and the drive home was silent and resentful, except for the regular sniffles of whichever child felt he or she had been unjustifiably admonished.

the sour smell of failure.

physiotherapy

That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.

You put up with little things … and then the little things gradually get bigger.

“Like the frog getting boiled to death,”

“You know that theory: if you put a frog in warm water and keep slowly turning up the heat, it doesn’t jump out because it doesn’t realize it’s slowly being boiled to death.”

Her mother had too much time on her hands. That was the problem. She was going a little dotty. She spent hours looking at old photos and then ringing her children to tell them how little and cute they’d been and how sorry she was for not noticing it at the time.

What she remembered was the extraordinary, astonishing pain, and her fury with her mother for not fixing it. She didn’t expect her dad or the doctors to fix it. She expected her mother to fix it.

“The days are so long,” her mother had sighed to Brooke. “They used to be so short.

Amy was speaking too fast now, in that weird manic voice she sometimes put on that made Brooke wonder if she actually was bipolar. She did it on purpose. She liked people to think she was crazy, because it made them nervous. It was an intimidation tactic.

relationship isn’t a bill you split down the middle,” Nico always told her. He was wrong. It was exactly like that. She’d keep an eye on it.

the family had begun playing with the idea that Stan was “elderly.”

“Elderly

Logan saw all of his siblings jerk their heads in a mutual shocked shift of perspective.

“It’s like seeing Thor in a hospital gown,”

Dad shouldn’t climb ladders.

Dad needs to watch

Logan could sense Stan’s desire to call him to the net, to point out his weaknesses, to explain exactly where he was going wrong and where he could improve, but he never did criticize Logan’s life choices, he just asked questions and

looked disappointed with the answers.

gentrified.

Joy had a rule that whenever one of her children telephoned, she dusted

The time will come, my darling, we’ll get frail and sick and stubborn and your stomach will twist with love and terror each time we call, but plenty of time, don’t get ahead of yourself, we’re not there yet.

Did I notice how beautiful they were? Was I actually there? Did I just skim the surface of my entire damned life?)

parochial,

Now Logan competed against Troy by not competing, which was fucking genius. You couldn’t win if only one of you was playing.

He wanted to beat Logan when Logan wasn’t even playing.

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.

She felt hollowed out, scooped out, empty,

Right now the word separation felt as violent and irreversible as an amputation.

knock her for six,

You could never argue properly with Logan because he didn’t care. The angrier you got the calmer he’d become.

because she was a woman, and women know that babies and husbands and sick parents can derail your dreams,

“Spectacular doesn’t win the match,”

You failed. Because the children’s medical care was her responsibility and she couldn’t fix Brooke’s headaches.

When I look back over the last decade, it’s like looking at a battlefield strewn with the corpses of all the perfectly lovely young men and women who have been in unsuccessful relationships with my annoying, ungrateful children.

That stain would be there forever.

This told Christina nothing. Gentle people snapped. People who were patient and kind in some circumstances were cruel and vicious in others.

If he wasn’t getting her warm body next to him in bed, he didn’t want her cold friendly voice in his ear.

She was their mad queen, to whom they still all swore their lifelong allegiance.

remember thinking they looked like mother and daughter.”

Is Savannah Joy’s daughter? Or does Savannah THINK she is Joy’s daughter???