The Pool My Neighbor Destroyed

I remember the day the can was finally full. It was a Tuesday in May and Russ dumped it out on the kitchen table after supper and we counted it into stacks, the three of us, because June was in bed, and Cole kept losing count and starting over and getting mad at himself, and Russ kept messing him up on purpose to hear him squawk. Fourteen hundred and some dollars in ones and fives and a lot of quarters. Russ scooped it all into a feed sack and the next Saturday we drove it to Dewey Rinker’s lot on the highway and bought the pool and the pump and a box of chemicals I did not understand, and Dewey counted our quarters without one word about it being quarters, which is the kind of man Dewey is, and that will matter later.

We set it up over Memorial Day weekend. Russ’s brother came with his level and we spent a whole Saturday getting the ground flat, and we filled it off the garden hose for three days and it ran our well pump so hard I thought we’d burn it up. But then it was full. Then it was blue and cold and ours.

That was the best summer of my children’s lives. I am not exaggerating that. It was a hot, long, wet summer and every single day after I got off work the kids were in that water from four o’clock until I made them get out for supper, and half the time they got back in after. Cole learned to do a flip off the ladder. June learned to put her face under and blow bubbles, and she was so proud of it that she made everybody watch, every single time, like it was the first time. Their friends came. The Dillard kids from down the road, and my sister’s two when she worked a double. There were afternoons I had six, seven, eight kids in and around that pool, all of them shrieking and splashing and laughing, and I would sit on the deck steps with a sweet tea and think, this is it, this is the thing I will remember when I am old.

There is a sound a yard full of wet children makes, and if you have ever stood in your own kitchen and heard it through a screen door you know there is nothing on this earth that sounds more like a summer being spent right. June would come in near dark with her lips a little blue and her fingertips gone to prunes and her hair stinking of chlorine, and she would climb in my lap too wet to be in my lap and fall asleep there before I could even get her dried off. I would carry her down the hall and lay her in her bed and her whole small body would smell like the pool, and I would think, nobody can take this. I actually thought that. Nobody can take this.