Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

“Never spoil a good story with the facts.”

(Her dad had recently turned fifty, and it was cute the way he thought his opinions still had value.)

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

Joy preferred not to embarrass Steffi by offering her dog food, as Steffi didn’t appear to know she was a dog.

“I don’t think it works like that,” said Joy. “It starts out small. You put up with little things in a relationship and then … the little things gradually get bigger.”

When she looked at photos of her children when they were little, she sometimes thought, Did I notice how beautiful they were? Was I actually there? Did I just skim the surface of my entire damned life?)

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

any marriage of that many years has multiple motives for murder. Every police officer and hairdresser knows that.

Why are you always so cynical, Christina? Because nice, ordinary people lie and steal and cheat and murder, Nico.

The views had been magical. What was the harm in it? Why not rewrite the memory and remember it as a perfect day? What was the actual benefit of accuracy when it came to memories? What would her dear sweet little memoir-writing teacher have to say about that?

The trick with Amy was to go along for the ride with her. Let her talk crazy-fast when she was happy. Let her be sad when she was sad, and resist the urge to list all the reasons why she should not be sad.

The risk of upsetting Stan outweighed the risk of upsetting Amy. The risk of upsetting Stan had always outweighed the risk of upsetting any of the children.

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.”

Amy felt many emotions on a given day: desire for inappropriate men, nostalgia for long-ago days that never actually happened, great rolling waves of happiness and sadness, bouts of high-level panic and low-level anxiety, but rage was an emotion with which she was not familiar, so it took her a moment to identify the feeling whooshing through her veins.

How could the reality of grief be worse than her imagining of it, when she had imagined it so very, very hard? How would she cope now, when her parents inevitably did die, as parents inevitably did, and you had to be so grown-up and mature about it? How did people cope with ordinary, predictable tragedy? It was impossible, insurmountable

Funny how words disappeared, became quaint and ridiculous, like fashions and opinions you once held dear.

A husband could leave, like Stan, but a husband could also never return, like Joy’s father. Stan always came back.

Sometimes she abrogated responsibility by fantasizing about kidnappers bursting into the house, bundling her into the back of their van, and taking her away for a long rest in a nice, cool, quiet dungeon.

He wished he hadn’t hurt her. He didn’t understand why he’d done it, except that all through his life he’d been at the mercy of a powerful desire: the desire to blow everything up.

“You’re a fool,” his father had said when Troy cheated on Claire. “She was too good for you.” “I know,” Troy had said. That’s why I did it, Dad. Before she noticed.

Brooke had told her that he’d accepted an interstate secondment early in the year. Ines and Brooke had agreed this was good news. It was preferable ex-husbands left the state if not the country or the planet.

Caro knew retirement could be stressful. No routine. Just the two of you stuck in your home, stuck in your aging bodies.

The past could look very different depending on where you stood to look at it.

When she thought of that long night, it was like remembering an extraordinarily tough match where she’d prevailed. Except there was no trophy or applause. The only recognition you got for surviving a night like that came from other mothers. Only they understood the epic nature of your trivial achievements.

When they’d arrived, three hours ago, they’d been told to remain in the living room, where they should all sit back and relax. It was extremely stressful.

“I was angry every time Dad left.” She massaged her jaw. “But I was even angrier with Mum for putting up with it.”

Yet they all had to maintain the pretense that because Stan was the man, whatever he was doing was automatically more important and deserved priority over any contribution from the little lady.

Her mother specialized in the tiny razor-sharp dig wrapped in a soft compliment, so you didn’t notice the blood until afterward.

Finally she’d said it out loud. All these years it had been there, never on the tip of her tongue, not at the back of her head, but right at the center of her chest, beneath her collarbone, between her breasts, right where she continued to bang her fist, over and over.

For the first time in her sixty-nine years she felt the fear: the fear every woman knows is always waiting for her, the possibility that lurks and scuttles in the shadows of her mind, even if she’s spent her entire life being so tenderly loved and protected by good men.

She missed him. She missed sex. She had assumed sex was like chocolate—if it wasn’t in the house she wouldn’t think about it.

“I love you too, Amy.” It wasn’t the first time she’d heard those words from a man, it was just the first time she believed them.

Move on. Once you’ve hit a ball there’s no point watching to see where it’s going. You can’t change its flight path now. You have to think about your next move. Not what you should have done. What you do now.

She was a girl of her time and she was a girl whose father had walked out and never returned. She believed men’s egos were as fragile as eggs. She believed that you needed to do everything possible to make sure that your man returned home.