Apples Never Fall

Just hours after the disastrous Fathers’ Day dinner, Joy must be taken to the hospital with a urinary tract infection. She stays there for two days.

The Fathers’ Day family get-together reminds Logan, as he lounges around his apartment, how much he misses Indira—she has moved across the country to Perth. He misses everything that irritated him about her: her “questions, her perfume, her insistence he eat bananas, her sneakers by the front door, her high-pitched sneezes…her body” (211).

Although they talk on the phone, he’s aware of how present she is in her absence. In between classes at the community college, he channel-surfs the television and thinks back to his childhood and his father’s odd penchant for simply walking out when emotions in the house ran high. He’d be gone for hours, sometimes days. The first time he disappeared, Logan recalls, Brooke had her first migraine. Indira often characterized Logan’s passivity and emotional distance as a variation of his father’s long walks. On the television, in a documentary on abused wives, Logan hears one of them tell of a fight with her husband over an unpaid cable bill. The story bears striking similarities to the story Savannah told about the night she fled her abusive boyfriend.