Fourteen Kids at the County Pool

Why I Let It Sit

People have asked me since why I didn’t do more. My brother told me to take Craig to small claims court.

There was nothing on paper. It was a handshake between neighbors in a driveway. I’d have been the guy who sued the family next door over pool chlorine.

And we have to live there. Logan and Tanner have to go to school together for four more years. You don’t burn down a street to get three hundred dollars back.

Most of all, though, I didn’t want my son to learn that when somebody wrongs you, the answer is to make a big ugly scene in their front yard. He was watching me. He’s always watching me.

Logan didn’t ask about the money again. He just went quiet about it the way kids do when they’ve decided something about the world and don’t like it.

He kept mowing. He’d ride his bike past the Dahls’ fence on the way to his jobs and keep his eyes straight ahead. Some afternoons we could hear Tanner splashing alone, and Logan would turn the TV up.

What got me was Tanner. That boy came over to our house the very next day and sat on our back step with Logan, and they didn’t say ten words. Tanner looked like he hadn’t slept.

“My mom’s real mad,” Tanner said finally.

“I didn’t do anything,” Logan said.

“I know,” Tanner said. Then he went home.

I heard that from my porch, and I thought about it a long time. I know, he’d said. Not I believe you. I know. I filed that away.

The Idea

It was Karen who gave me the idea, though she’d tell you she didn’t.

The last week of June, she came home from a double and dropped into a kitchen chair and said, “The whole street is miserable. Did you notice that? Every kid on this block is sitting in their yard staring at that fence.”

She was right. The Dahls had stopped having anybody over. Melissa wasn’t being mean. She was scared, and scared looks a lot like mean. The pool sat back there all blue and empty, and the street was full of kids with nowhere to go.

The Walsh kids couldn’t go back after what happened with Ben. The Olsen twins had never been invited. The Petersen boys had been told it was family only.

“The county pool’s still open,” I said.

“Brian,” Karen said, “the county pool has been open every summer since 1958. Nobody goes because everybody’s got a sprinkler and a TV.”

That night I sat out on the porch and counted kids on my fingers. Then I wrote their names down the way Logan wrote his lawns. When I finished there were fourteen names on it, counting Logan and counting Tanner.

The Fourth was on a Saturday that year. I had the day off. Karen was working a double at the care center, because the holidays are when the young aides call in.

I called the county pool the next morning to check. The lady who answered told me daily admission was five dollars a kid and three for little ones under five. Open noon to eight on the Fourth. Kids under ten had to have an adult with them on the deck.

Fourteen kids at five dollars. Seventy dollars. I’d spent more than that on a single tank of diesel for the farm truck.