Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

Amy once told Joy that she had no idea how lonely it felt to be single. Joy had wanted to tell her that you could still be lonely when you were married, that there had been times when she had woken up day after day crushed with loneliness, and still made breakfast for four children.

‘Yeah, well, I’m sad about Indira too, and I’m sad about Grant. But life goes on. We live to play another day.’

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 said, ‘You don’t have to say you’re sorry,’ because he didn’t. If they started saying sorry, where would it begin and where would it end? They went down to the hotel buffet breakfast, silent in the lift, and never spoke of it again.

Now when she looked back on those twenty-one days she first had to work her way through feelings of shame for the dreadful hullabaloo she’d caused, but once she got past that, she remembered that time like a sun-dappled dream, a holiday from her life and a holiday from herself, or the self that she’d become.

The wooden house where they’d stayed was surrounded by a four-hundred-year-old rainforest, waterfalls and walking trails. Kangaroos and wallabies regularly streaked past the oversized window, like passing cars on a quiet suburban street.

Joy slept deeply and dreamlessly in a single bed. There were no mirrors in the house, and without evidence of her own face, or a husband or children, it felt strangely as though she were once again Joy Becker, with...

She and Savannah took long walks on their own and sometimes together. They read, for hours at a time. The house had a shelf full of very old paperbacks, none of which had been published after 1970. Time slowed and softened like a long hot summer from childhood.

Joy loved the silence. She knew that she didn’t have the personality to do this on her own – she wouldn’t have lasted – but having Savannah there, half-stranger, half-friend, was the perfect compromise.

She made the right choice for the girl she was then.

One day Joy might have a granddaughter who played tennis – all her grandchildren would play, it was impossible to imagine otherwise – and it wouldn’t occur to that precious girl of the future to give up her dreams of competitive tennis, or anything else, for a boy. Also Joy wouldn’t let her.

For the first time she understood what a privilege it was to be able to say that. *

She could see her decade with Grant as a failure, or she could see it as a success. It was a relatively short marriage that was now ending in a mildly acrimonious divorce. It was also a long-term relationship with many happy memories that ended exactly when it should have ended.