Except Brooke could, because Harry hadn’t always been a saint. When he was a kid, back when Brooke and her siblings knew him, he was a sneaky, strategic cheat. He used cheating as a tactic: not just to score points but to rattle and enrage his opponents. Her dad never believed it. He had always suffered from tunnel vision when it came to Harry, but then again, nearly all adults used to have tunnel vision when it came to Harry. All they saw was his sublime talent.
While playing a match against Brooke’s brother Troy when they were teenagers, Harry kept blatantly calling balls out that were plainly in. Troy finally snapped. He chucked his racquet, jumped the net and got in a couple of good hits. It took two adult men to drag Troy away from Harry.
Troy was banned from playing for six months, which was better than he deserved according to their father, who took a long time to forgive Troy for shaming him like that.
And then, just two years later, Harry Haddad betrayed Stan Delaney when he dumped him as a coach after he won the Australian Open Boys’ Singles. Brooke’s dad was blindsided. He had assumed, with good reason, that he was taking Harry all the way. He loved him like a son. Maybe more than his own sons, because Harry never questioned a drill, never rebelled, never sighed or rolled his eyes or dragged his feet as he walked onto the court.
It was supposedly not Harry’s but his father’s decision to leave Delaneys. Elias Haddad, Harry’s photogenic, charismatic father, was his manager, and there in the player’s box at every match with a beautiful new girlfriend by his side. Brooke and her siblings never believed that Harry wasn’t involved in the decision-making process to dump their dad, in spite of the heartfelt card he sent their father, or the earnest, disingenuous way he spoke in fawning magazine profiles about his gratitude for his first-ever coach. Her dad never let himself get that close to a player again. He was beloved by his students and he gave them his all, except he kept his heart safe. That was Brooke’s theory, anyway.
Brooke drove into the busy car park of The Piazza, as her local shopping village was now called after its recent redevelopment. Everyone enjoyed mocking the ‘Tuscan hilltop town’ theme but Brooke didn’t care much either way. The new Italian deli was great, the café had put up some nice photos of Tuscany, the hanging baskets of artificial flowers seemed almost real if you didn’t look too closely, and at least the fake cobblestones didn’t catch heels like real cobblestones.
‘Although the occasional twisted ankle would probably be good for your business, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, hey, Brooke?’ the local MP had said on opening day last month, after he’d cut the ceremonial ribbon with a pair of giant novelty scissors. The MP was one of those men who gave everything he said a vaguely sexual connotation.
If this trial separation maintained its momentum and rolled all the way towards a divorce, which it seemed to be doing, Brooke would have to date. She’d have to put on lipstick and endure vague sexual connotations over coffee.
She pulled into her favourite parking spot, turned off the ignition and looked at her bare left hand on the steering wheel. No indentations to mark her missing wedding and engagement rings. She never wore them to work anyway, and often she’d forgotten to wear them on the weekend, which was maybe relevant, but probably not. She was looking for signs she’d missed.
Brooke’s clinic, Delaney’s Physiotherapy, was a two-room office she rented in between the café and the fruit and veg shop. The previous tenant had been a tarot card reader whose customers still sometimes turned up hoping for an ‘emergency reading’. Just last week a guy in a paisley shirt and tight pants had said, ‘Oh, well, if you can’t read my cards you might as well check out this dodgy knee of mine.’ Brooke had predicted surgery in his future.
‘Brrrr! It sure doesn’t feel like spring yet!’ said the weather reporter.
Brooke fixed a stray eyelash in her rear-vision mirror. Her eyes were red and watery. She would tell today’s patients she had allergies. Nobody wanted a physio with migraines.
Nobody wanted a wife with chronic migraines. A daughter or a sister with migraines. Or even a friend with migraines. All those cancellations! Brooke let the self-pitying train of thought unravel only so far before she snipped it short.
‘Who’s looking forward to the last few weeks of the snow season?’ said the weather reporter.
‘I am,’ said Brooke. Spring skiing meant torn and strained knee ligaments, back injuries, wrist fractures.
Please God, let there be injuries. Just enough to get that cash flow flowing.
God replied in the same aggrieved way Brooke’s mother answered the phone when her children left it too long without checking in: Hello, stranger.
Forget I asked, thought Brooke. She turned off the radio, undid her seatbelt, and sat for a moment. Her stomach roiled. Mild nausea was expected the day after a migraine. Come on, she told herself, like she was a toddler. Out you get.
Even on a good day, when she wasn’t postdrome, when she had arrived somewhere she actually really wanted to be, she always experienced this resistance to getting out of the car. It was a little weird but it wasn’t a thing. Just a quirk. No-one noticed. Well, Grant noticed, if they were running late, but no-one else noticed. It dated back to her days of competitive tennis. She’d arrive at a tournament and be paralysed by her desire to stay in the warm musty cocoon of the car. But she always did move in the end. It was not a thing. She was not her sister.
No rush. She had half an hour before her first appointment.
She hugged the steering wheel and watched a big-bellied man pick up a hefty box from outside the post office without bending his knees. That’s the way, buddy, strain those back muscles.
When she’d taken on the lease for the clinic, she’d known about the planned redevelopment and been offered a substantially reduced rent as a result, but she hadn’t anticipated that months would slide by with delay after delay. Business slowed for everyone. The overpriced patisserie closed after forty years of business. The hairdressers’ marriage broke up.
It was stressful and Brooke needed to manage stress in order to manage her migraines. Migraine sufferers shouldn’t start new businesses or separate from their husbands and they certainly shouldn’t do both at the same time. They should move gingerly through their days, as if they had spinal cord injuries.
Brooke had just managed to keep her fledgling practice afloat, barely. There was a period where she didn’t have a single patient for twenty-three days in a row. The words, ‘You need more money, you need more money, you need more money’ buzzed in her ears like tinnitus.
But now the renovations were complete. The diggers, trucks and jackhammers were gone. The car park was full every day. The café that had replaced the patisserie bustled. The hairdressers were back together and booked up six weeks ahead.
‘It’s now or never,’ her accountant had told her. ‘This next quarter will be make or break.’