for the front desk. Her interview reached Colin thirdhand, by way of Walter
by way of the parks supervisor's assistant, and it arrived in his kitchen worn
smooth as a coin from the telling: the supervisor had asked whether she
understood the responsibility of the gate β the sign-ins, the memberships,
knowing at all times who belonged in the water and who did not β and
Becca, who had once greeted Val's paying guests at other people's fences
with a smile and a list she should never have held, had answered, "I'm very
good at knowing whose pool I'm in. Now." She got the job on the spot,
Walter said, or near enough that the difference was ceremonial. Colin
cherished the sentence the way he cherished few things that year. He wrote it
in the back of the logbook, in his square hand, on the page reserved for
remarks, because it seemed to him that it belonged to the record of the water
too: the whole confession of the whole summer, in nine words, from the least
likely penitent in Heron Bay.
It was Peggy Lawson who proposed the swim morning, in May, in the course
of ordinary business β she had come by on a Saturday with the association's
new printed calendar in hand and a question about his pump's opinion of the
community pool's heater, and she stood in his pump room a while looking at
the logbook and the crayon sun with the air of a woman reading a school
after a hard year. The community pool's opening was set for June; the
calendar had a blank Wednesday in it, the first Wednesday of summer, and
blanks in calendars were, in Peggy's professional philosophy, merely
decisions that hadn't been supervised yet. "Your yard is the one this
neighborhood learned to read, Colin," she said. "It might do the street some
good to see it in the bulletin β open, printed, with a sign-in sheet at the gate
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and your name at the bottom as host. Everything in the open. Everything
signed." He thought about it the length of one test reading, which was his
way of thinking about most things, and then he thought about the first
Wednesdays β the towels that hadn't been his, the glasses rinsed and
replaced by careful strangers, the water keeping its own counsel and its own
account β and he said yes, and chose the date himself, the first Wednesday
of summer, because a man who has had a day of the week taken from him
should be the one to give it back. Peggy wrote it into the calendar on the
spot, in ink, in her principal's hand: Community Swim β the Avery Pool β
Host: C. Avery β Guests Welcome β Sign In at the Gate. It was, Colin
reflected, reading it over her shoulder, the first invitation to his own pool that
had ever been issued with his knowledge, and it was printed, and published,
and posted on the community board for anyone to read β which was to say,
it was the anti-Wednesday in every particular, and it pleased him more than
any document since the verdict.
In April her house sold, and the moving truck came on a Wednesday β a
Wednesday chosen by the moving company, for its own reasons of
scheduling, and not by meaning at all. Colin was two streets over that
morning on his round, test kit in hand at a client's house whose pump had
been making a noise like a spoon in a disposal, and from their driveway he
could see the truck backed up to Val's garage and the ramp down and the
men carrying out the furniture of a life being carefully, professionally
concluded. She came out once onto the porch with a box of kitchen things
wrapped in newspaper, and she saw him, and he saw her see him, and across
two lawns and a street and everything that had passed between their houses,
they exchanged the smallest civility available to two human beings β a nod,
given and returned, no more than that. The war was over, and it was reduced
at last to what it always should have been: two neighbors, one of whom had
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knocked too late, and one who had finally locked his gate.
The following June, on the first Wednesday of summer, Colin opened his
pool the way it was always meant to be opened: by invitation, in the open,
with the gate standing wide because his own hand had set it wide. The new
board's published calendar had carried the morning for a month β
Community Swim, the Avery Pool, guests welcome, sign in at the gate β in
Peggy Lawson's plain type, between the minutes and the vendor contracts,
where anybody in Heron Bay could read it and nobody had to whisper it.
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