grievance and a lawyer, that a failure came out of the ground or the sky and
not out of his workmanship โ and it had hardened, the way useful habits do,
into something nearer to ritual. The sensor log ran underneath it, a
continuous ribbon of pH and oxidation and copper levels printed by the
controller in the corner, spooling its patient graph onto a roll he changed on
the first of the month. June had teased him that he kept a diary in water
because he could not be trusted to keep one in words. She had not been
wrong. He could look at the second week of a wet October three years gone
and tell you what the weather had been from the way the vials clouded.
His rhythm was set by the company's jobs. Avery Pools & Water designed
and serviced high-end installations across three states, and Colin, at
fifty-two, with a founder's perverse refusal to become a man who only signed
things, still traveled the install circuit himself. Monday out, Thursday home,
was the usual shape of it โ a grotto retrofit in Bluffton, a competition pool at
a school in Macon, a vanishing edge on a bluff above the Savannah River for
a man who had made his money in car washes and wanted to look at water
while he ate. Colin would walk a site in the morning with the plans rolled
under his arm and be under the water by afternoon with a wrench, checking
the bonds on the light niches, because bonding was where pools killed people
when they killed people, and he did not delegate the things that could kill.
4
The neighbors in Heron Bay Estates had absorbed this rhythm of his the way
neighbors absorb anything, into their general picture of the street. Colin
Avery was the quiet widower with the beautiful pool and the company trucks
that came and went on Mondays, a man who would fix your gate latch or
your irrigation timer without being asked twice and without ever once
making you feel the size of the favor. He was, in the gated and landscaped
judgment of Heron Bay, an asset to the community. The association's
president fined him twice a month.
The fines arrived on association letterhead, cream paper with the heron at the
top worked in a tasteful bronze, and they concerned, in rotation that had
become almost musical, his unpermitted water feature, his fence, and his
equipment noise. The unpermitted water feature was the counter-current unit
at the shallow end โ a swim-in-place machine June had wanted in her last
year, when the river of her strength was narrowing and she still meant to
swim against something every day of her life. Colin had permitted it through
the county in a process involving eleven forms, two inspections, and a
variance hearing at which he had brought engineering drawings and a
patience he described afterward as hydrostatic. The association's position, as
expressed in the letters, was that county permission was a county matter. The
fence was the fence he had built to code and a half inch over the association's
preferred height, an error of half an inch he had measured, photographed,
documented, and declined to correct on the principle that a half inch is not a
principle anyone else in Heron Bay had ever been asked to die on. The
equipment noise was the pool pump, which ran, as pool pumps do, and which
his nearest neighbor, a retired judge named Whitaker, had twice testified in
writing that he could not hear from his own porch with a hearing aid in.
Colin answered every letter. He answered them politely, in full sentences,
with enclosures. He paid none of them. The fines accumulated in a file folder
5
in his desk the way snow accumulates against a fence in a country he no
longer lived in โ as weather, not as debt.
Valerie Kessler had run the Heron Bay association for six years, and she ran
the community the way she had once run the most successful realty office in
the county, which was as a property whose value depended on the discipline
of its surfaces. She was fifty-seven, handsome in the maintained way of
women who have made a religion of it, and she sold houses in Heron Bay
with a proprietary pride that stopped just short of her name on the gate. A
neighborhood is a standard you can see, she liked to say, at meetings, at the
mailbox kiosk, once unforgettably at a child's lemonade stand whose signage
she had asked to have brought into compliance with the community's font
guidelines. Colin heard these things the way you hear weather in another
county. He had a private store of irony he kept for the letters, and the richest
seam of it was this: that no one in Heron Bay Estates knew water the way he
knew it. They had pools the way they had grand pianos, as furniture with
ambitions. He had spent his life inside the chemistry of the stuff, knew what
it kept and what it confessed, knew that water was the most honest witness in
any house because it could not be coached and did not forget. And the