Colin Avery read water the way other men read faces, and on the mornings
he was home, he read his own before the sun had finished climbing over the
pines at the back of the lot. He came out through the kitchen door in the blue
hour with a mug in one hand and the test vial in the other, barefoot on
decking that was still cool, and he stood at the deep end and looked down the
length of the pool the way a man looks down a road he built himself.
Twenty-five yards, four lanes wide in spirit if not in paint. The surface held
the sky without a ripple in it. A pool tells you everything if you know the
language. Oils sit in a faint rainbow at the skimmer line. Metals bloom where
they should not. A chemistry going wrong announces itself a day before it
shows, in a dullness at the deep end, a refusal of the water to sparkle. Colin's
water sparkled. It always sparkled. He had made a profession, and then a
company, and then a reputation out of the fact that his water sparkled.
He dipped the vial at arm's length below the surface, the way he had been
taught as an apprentice forty years ago and the way he now taught his own
crews, and he capped it while it was still submerged, so no air got in to lie to
the sample. Then he set the mug down and went in for his laps. The pool was
not heated. He had never seen the point of heating a thing that was meant to
wake you. He went off the end in a shallow dive and counted the strokes by
breath, four down, four back, the lane rope bumping his shoulder now and
then the way a familiar dog brushes a leg in passing. The rope was June's. It
was strung the way she had liked it, a hand's width lower on the far hook so
it bellied almost imperceptibly to the left at the midpoint, a flaw she had
refused for eleven summers to let him correct. June had swum competitively
until she was forty-nine and coached other people's children until she was
fifty-eight, and she had opinions about lane ropes the way she had opinions
about everything having to do with water, which was that water forgave
2
sloppiness in a person exactly never, and punished it on a schedule you could
set a watch by. She had died two summers ago, in a bed they had moved to
the sunroom so she could see the pool through the glass. The last thing she
had supervised, with the organized interest of a woman directing traffic from
a porch, was the resealing of the coping stones. A man learns things about
grief he did not ask to know. One of them is that it is mostly logistics.
Another is that a pool does not stop needing its chemistry because the person
it was built for has gone.
He had built the pool the year she got sick, though built is too small a word
for what had happened in the backyard that spring. He had designed pools for
thirty years — estate pools in Charleston with infinity edges that poured
toward marsh grass, hotel pools in Atlanta with grottos he privately
considered crimes, a famous pool in Charlotte shaped like the first letter of
its owner's name, which he had taken the money for and never once put in
the company portfolio. This one he had poured and plumbed and tiled with
his own hands and two of his oldest crewmen, working evenings after the
paying jobs, in the months between June's diagnosis and the first of the
treatments. She had sat in a canvas chair with a blanket over her knees in
April and watched the gunite go on and told him the deep end wanted
another six inches. It had not wanted another six inches. He had put in the six
inches anyway, because a marriage is not a blueprint, and because she was
right often enough in their life that her being wrong beautifully was a kind of
data too. The pool had her proportions. When he swam it at dawn he was
swimming the length of an argument he had been happy to lose.
After the laps he toweled off in the pump room, which was where the house
kept its true order. Other men had workbenches with forty years of screws in
coffee cans. Colin had a room that hummed at a hundred and four degrees of
3
warm machinery air, with the filter bank plumbed in copper he had sweated
himself, the ionizer's readout glowing its green numerals, and along the north
wall, under a strip light, the shelves of the water library. That was his crews'
name for it, half joke and half respect. Rows of sample vials, each no bigger
than a shot glass, each labeled in his square draftsman's hand with the date
and the hour. Morning draws and evening draws, every day he was home,
going back to the first fill. It had begun as warranty discipline — a builder
who keeps dated water can prove, to an insurer or a court or a client with a