coffee and say: now tell it in order, Colin, because a thing told in order is a
thing half handled. She had been a coach. She believed in order the way
clergy believe in liturgy, as the shape that lets the truth bear weight. He sat
15
down at the table alone, in the house that still organized itself around her
absence the way water organizes itself around a stone, and he told it in order
to the empty chair.
In order, then. A pool he had built with his hands for the woman in the chair.
A system of such sensitivity that it could find a stranger's perfume in twenty
thousand gallons and write it in a graph. A summer of Thursdays in which he
had come home to off water and blamed the only workmanship he had ever
been proud of, recalibrating, replacing, doubting the instruments and then
doubting the hand that held them, because the alternative โ the actual
alternative, the one now sitting across from him in nine small glasses โ had
not occurred to a man whose whole training said that water does not lie and
therefore the fault must be findable, and the fault must be his. A gate latch
hanging on one screw. A champagne cork behind a pump housing. A towel,
navy and coral, still drying over the back of a chair in his yard. And the
president of the Heron Bay Estates Homeowners Association, who fined him
twice a month for the noise of his own pump, filing out of his side gate at
dusk with her friends and her cooler, calling a pleasantry back over her
shoulder to his dead wife's pool like a woman leaving her own club.
He thought about what the law would call it, and found he did not care yet
what the law would call it. He thought about what the street would call it, if
the street knew, and found he cared about that even less, though it surprised
him. What he cared about, sitting in the lamplight with the summer in front
of him, was smaller and larger than scandal. Nine Wednesdays they had
taken the one thing in his life that was kept. Not the water โ water is
replaceable, he replaced water for a living, he could drain that pool to the
shell and fill it from the hydrant and have it swim-ready by Friday noon.
What they had taken was the keeping itself. They had made his vigilance
16
ridiculous. They had stood him in his own pump room, Thursday after
Thursday, apologizing to a pool that was trying to tell him something, and he
had corrected the chemistry and silenced it the way you'd silence a smoke
alarm for shrieking. The water had been reporting them all summer,
faithfully, in the only language it had, and he had read every report as a
confession of his own failure. That was the wound with the temperature in it.
Not trespass. Translation. He had misread the most honest witness in his
house because he could not imagine the crime was anything but his own
decline.
The lamp hummed very faintly, the way lamps do in houses after midnight
has been decided on. Outside the glass the pool had gone the color of slate,
and the ionizer's little green eye burned in the pump room doorway across
the yard, patient, on duty, keeping its log. He reached forward and turned one
of the vials a quarter turn in its place, so its label sat square to him, and then
another, and another, the draftsman in him surfacing without permission.
He lined the nine vials on the kitchen table under the light like place settings,
labels facing him. Nine Wednesdays in their little glasses, clouded each one
the same way, a summer of other people's afternoons held up to a lamp in a
widower's kitchen. He looked at them a long time. Then he got up, unhurried,
and went out through the dark yard to the pool, and stood at the deep end
where he had stood at dawn in Beaufort with another day's water in his head,
and he took a tenth vial from the rack inside the pump room door and drew
that evening's water from his own pool โ the water they had swum in, still
holding everything they had brought into it, the coconut and the champagne
and the long green bloom of the afternoon โ and he capped it below the
surface the way he had been taught forty years ago, and he carried it back
through the yard and set it at the head of the table, in the tenth place, where
17
the host sits. He took up his pen. His labels carried the date and the hour and
nothing else; they had carried nothing else in thirty years, because the water
was the record and the record did not editorialize. He wrote the date. He
wrote the hour. And then he wrote one word more than his labels usually
carry, in his square hand, in ink that would outlast the summer: GUESTS.
"You weren't slipping," he said to the empty kitchen, to the pool, to the part
of his life that had doubted its own workmanship. "You were keeping the
guest list."