They came up his driveway in twos and threes with towels over their arms:
the Petersens, whose daughter made straight for the shallow end like a girl
returning to a country she had once been exiled from and finding it kind;
neighbors whose names he had spent a year learning to attach to their faces
again; children in arm bands and goggles, shrieking at the cold of the first
step down. At his gate, with a sign-in sheet on a clipboard and a pencil
sharpened to a professional point, stood Becca Halston, checking in the
guests of the Wednesday Club β the hostess of it, honest at last, in the right
job at last, in the right yard.
Peggy Lawson came up the driveway at ten in a sun hat with her towel
folded over her arm like a legal brief, and she signed Becca's sheet in her
principal's hand β Lawson, M., one guest, and her eyes traveled once
around the deck with the professional satisfaction of a woman inspecting an
assembly she had helped call to order. "Mr. Avery," she said, "the minutes
will reflect that this was well attended." Then she took off the sun hat, and
was only a neighbor again, and went in off the shallow steps with the
deliberation of a woman who had decided about the water in advance and
found her decision correct. The Petersen girl swam her length of the shallow
end to Walter's whistle with her whole face set on the far wall, and touched,
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and turned to look for her mother with her mouth open in astonishment at
herself, and the deck made the sound decks make when a child is safe and
amazed, and Colin, standing at the pump-room door with a stack of towels he
had forgotten he was holding, understood that this was the sound the yard
had been built for, and that it had simply taken a year of locks and letters to
get the guest list right.
Walter Simmons sat at the deep end in the canvas chair, seventy-eight years
old and entirely in his element, timing the children's laps with a stopwatch he
did not need and blowing a whistle June would have approved of at every
turn, calling out times like scripture to swimmers who believed every word
of them. June had strung the lane rope herself, the spring they put the pool in
β it had been her idea before it was his, her drawings on the kitchen table,
her conviction that a yard owed the neighborhood one beautiful useful thing
β and the rope still hung where she had hung it, re-strung by Colin every
spring since her death, the floats faded from red to the pink of old roses. The
water that morning was laboratory-clear, the kind of clear he charged other
people money to achieve and had achieved in his own yard at dawn, alone,
with the test kit and the brush; the steps were white; the pump hummed its
one contented note from the room behind the hedge, where the logbook lay
open and the crayon sun shone on the wall.
At noon, when the first wave had thinned to grill smoke and wet towels and
the particular peace of fed children, Colin went down the ladder into his own
pool and swam his laps in June's lane, slow and even, the way he had swum
them before any of it, counting lengths by the rope's floats passing overhead
like years. He surfaced at the shallow-end wall with the water running off
him and looked up the length of the deck at a crowd of people who had
knocked β who had come through his gate in daylight, by invitation, with
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their names written down in a guest's honest hand on a sheet anyone could
read β and the sight of it settled over him with the uncomplicated weight of
a thing finally standing where it was built to stand.
Becca came along the deck at noon with the clipboard against her chest and
the pencil behind her ear, checking her sheet with the gravity of a
harbormaster. "Your sheet's full, Mr. Avery," she said. "Forty-one names.
Everybody signed. Even Mr. Simmons, and he says signing things is how
this whole mess started." Colin considered the sheet, forty-one names in
forty-one hands, his neighbors written down in his own yard by the woman
who had once written them down in secret to let them into it. "It's a good
sheet, Becca," he said. "Best one this pool's ever had." She nodded once, the
way professionals do, and went back to her gate β his gate, her post β and
he watched her go with the peculiar tenderness of a man watching a tool
used, at last, for exactly the work it was made for.
A pool keeps everything you put in it, he thought. Sunscreen and champagne,
skin and summers, other people's trespasses and your own long patience; it
holds all of it without comment and gives back an exact account to anyone
who knows how to read it. People, he had learned, were much the same β
they kept what was poured into them, all of it, the envy and the kindness
alike β and the only choice a man ever really got was what he poured into