The Alarm He Called Paranoid
The water was the first thing that felt wrong
At 5:42 on a Tuesday in July, I came up my own gravel drive and heard my backyard before I saw it. Not laughter. Not the radio Dale left going on the picnic table. Just water. The slow slap of it against the metal wall of the above ground pool, over and over, wet and steady, while the late sun burned orange off the sliding door and lit up every smudge and handprint on the glass.
I want you to understand how ordinary the day had been up to that second. I had spent it the way I spent every summer weekday, in the little office at the Halesboro grain co-op, keeping the books, answering the phone, telling farmers whether their tickets had cleared. I stopped at the IGA on the way home because Dale had texted me at noon asking me to grab hamburger and buns and a bag of the sweet corn if they still had it. I bought all three. The paper sack had cut a red line into two of my fingers by the time I carried it around the side of the house, because our screen door sticks and it is easier to come in the back.
That is the only reason I saw them. The stuck screen door. If it had opened clean, I would have gone in the front, set my sack on the counter, and called out that supper would be late. Instead I came around the corner of the house into my own yard, and I saw my husband of twenty six years standing chest deep in that pool with his hands on Crystal Boone’s waist.
The bag did not fall. People always think a woman drops the groceries. I set it down. I set it right on the arm of the picnic table, very careful, the way you set something down when your whole body has gone quiet and slow. An ear of corn slid loose and thumped onto the bench and rolled and stopped. I remember watching it stop. I remember thinking the dumbest thought a person can think at a moment like that, which was that I had bought too much corn for a supper that was not going to happen.
Dale saw me second. Crystal saw me first, and she sank down until the water covered her to the collarbone, and something in her face tried to arrange itself into a look I was supposed to feel sorry for.