Apples Never Fall

Christmas is a disaster for the Delaneys despite Joy’s dogged efforts to bring the family together. As the champagne pours freely, the siblings reflect on their collapsed relationships and how much they miss their partners not being there.

Struggling for conversation topics, the kids comment on the large, ugly purple rug in the living room that, despite Joy’s vocal dislike of it, remains. Stan, meanwhile, is in his den poring over a review copy the legal department’s editors sent over of Harry Haddad’s memoirs to help fact check. Joy tries valiantly to prepare a family dinner only to trigger the smoke detectors when she burns a butter and brown sugar glaze. In a tense confrontation with Stan, who comes in and glibly offers to help Joy with lunch, Joy—without warning or apology—suddenly throws two expensive china cat statues, which belonged to Stan’s mother, against the wall. The rest of the day is a slow-motion catastrophe. The meal is late, and the conversation is strained.

The siblings elect to distance themselves from their parents for most of January. On Valentine’s Day morning, Joy, ever resilient and determined to win back her family, wakes up ready to surprise Stan with an apple crumble, his favorite dessert: “She was a fighter. She was a winner. She was Joy Delaney. She would not give up on this marriage. She would take decisive, aggressive action today” (379). Finding only a single apple in the fridge bin, she decides to take the bike Troy gave her for Christmas and head to the market. On the way back, however, she gets a flat tire and abandons the bike along the road, walking the rest of the way home: “Some days you lose” (381). She arrives back at home in no mood for a confrontation—but Stan, still poring over Haddad’s memoir, confronts her. This time, she returns the volley. She tells him that he cared too much about Harry, ignored his family, and—worst of all—couldn’t see that he wasn’t the coach a kid with that sort of promise needed: “He was better off without you” (388). She even says that she would’ve been a better coach for Harry Haddad. When Stan, typically, starts to walk out, Joy tries to restrain him and scratches his cheek with an uncut fingernail. Stan pauses, feeling a wellspring of unspoken anger, humiliation, and hurt. However, he doesn’t strike her; he simply turns and leaves.

Just after Stan departs, Joy is surprised to get a call from Savannah. Savannah says that she’s in therapy now and confides that she’s having an affair with a married plastic surgeon. She says that she knows she’s a terrible person for trying to destroy the Delaney family. She tells Joy that she has decided to join one of the charity events run by her brother’s foundation, a 21 Day Off the Grid Challenge to raise money for pediatric cancer research: three weeks in cabins in a remote camp five hours from Sydney, a chance to get away and think about things. Impulsively Joy asks to go with her. She scribbles a hasty note, which she tacks to the fridge with a magnet. Without her glasses, she texts a quick message to her kids. Unable to find her phone (she accidentally kicked it under the bed), Joy departs for three weeks off the grid.

Of course, no one back in Sydney knows this. The siblings struggle with the growing fear that their father may have snapped after learning about his wife’s complicity in destroying his one chance at tennis glory. Amy recalls her father’s toast at her wedding, when he extolled the joy and power of love, and she can’t believe he’s capable of murder.

Logan reunites with Indira when she comes to town for a baby shower—he shows her a screenshot of a three-bedroom house he wants to buy for them and, in tears, an engagement ring he wants to give her as soon as the complications with his parents are resolved. He tells her that she is “bloody beautiful.” Troy meets up with Claire, who has temporarily moved back to Sydney to try to get pregnant from their frozen embryos. However, it’s Simon, Amy’s on-again-off-again computer nerd boyfriend, who—googling Harry Haddad to find some clue about what Joy’s garbled text message might mean—stumbles onto the announcement of the 21 Day Off the Grid Challenge and sees a connection: The number 21 appeared in Joy’s garbled text message.

Meanwhile, detectives combing the area around the Delaney home recover a bloody blouse, one of Joy’s, that was carelessly buried. Later, the neighbor’s surveillance camera shows a grainy but unmistakable image of Stan at night hauling a roll of carpet to his car and struggling to put it in the trunk.

Twenty days have passed since Joy vanished. The detectives take Stan to police headquarters for interrogation in a windowless room. They ask about the argument that neighbors heard on Valentine’s Day, about the scratches on Stan’s cheeks, about the bloody blouse they recovered, and about the carpeting. Stan is adamant: After he argued with Joy about Harry Haddad, Stan left the house for the day—and when he returned, Joy was gone. Nevertheless, he decides that he wants a lawyer.

The next day, the police head to the Delaneys to arrest Stan for the murder. It’s at that moment that a stunned and confused Joy walks into the house. She tells them that she left a note—but they figure out that the magnet didn’t hold and the dog must have eaten it. Stan tells the police that to stay sane while Joy was gone, he finally disposed of the rug she so hated and sanded the floor beneath to a wonderfully polished glow. Joy bled on the blouse while gardening and tossed it away, but a neighbor’s cat apparently dragged it to its favorite spot in the garden and buried it. Joy tells them about her retreat—how she and Savannah both had time to think about their lives, the mistakes they made, and the chance to reboot their lives. Savannah had apologized for terrorizing the Delaneys and planned to fly home to see her mother in Adelaide. Joy is determined to make her family and her marriage work: “Forgiveness comes easier with age” (440).

The family reunites around Joy’s return. Amy decides to give Simon a chance as a real boyfriend rather than just a friend with benefits. Claire, now pregnant but locked down in Sydney because of the COVID pandemic, resolves to make her pregnancy work and arranges for Troy to have custody rights. The father of a promising tennis whiz approaches Logan and asks whether Logan might be interested in coaching the kid. Stan and Joy are last seen playing mixed doubles—finding in the dynamic of non-competitive doubles tennis a way to express their new commitment to each other.

Savannah flies home to Adelaide. On the long flight, she recalls her last days with her mother—how, sick of her mother’s emotional abuse and control, she essentially imprisoned her in her own bedroom. Savannah, determined to teach her mother what it meant to be starved for all those years, drugged her mother and left her only a handful of protein bars and bottled water, taking the key with her (wearing it around her neck) and gently kissing her goodbye. As the plane climbs high above the clouds, Savannah is uncertain what has happened, telling herself that a resourceful woman could have found numerous ways to get free. However, she may return home to find her mother starved to death. Perhaps the house will smell of “sugar and butter and love. Perhaps it would not” (462). She turns to the man next to her on the plane and says, by way of introduction for what will be a long flight, “My mother plays tennis” (464).