Fourteen Kids at the County Pool

The Fourth of July

It was ninety-four degrees by noon on the Fourth, and not a cloud in the whole sky. The flags were out on every porch on Elm Street.

I’d borrowed the church van, the white fifteen-passenger one, from Pastor Miller. He told me if I brought it back a kid short he’d make me teach Sunday school.

Kim drove her own car with the cooler, and the kids piled into that van with their towels and their goggles and their sunscreen. Fourteen kids. I counted three times before I pulled out.

Tanner was the last one in. His mother stood on the step behind him with her arms crossed. He climbed into the back next to Logan without a word, and Logan scooted over to make room.

Neither one of them said anything the whole drive. But by the time we turned into the fairgrounds, Tanner had elbowed Logan once and Logan had elbowed him back, and that was a start.

The county pool sits behind the 4-H barns. It’s a big rectangle of concrete with a shallow end that runs out to a rope and a deep end with two boards, a low one and a high dive. There’s a lifeguard chair on each side and a fence around it all.

The ticket window is a little sliding glass window in a low metal-sided building painted the same white it’s been painted my whole life.

I lined them up behind me, all fourteen, in swimsuits with their towels clutched in their arms. Logan stood right at my elbow.

The girl at the window looked up at me in my gray t-shirt and my co-op ball cap over my short brown hair, sunburned already from a week of driving with my window down, and then she looked past me at the line, and her eyebrows went up.

“How many?” she said.

“Fourteen,” I said. “All kids.”

“That’s seventy dollars,” she said.

I had it in cash, seventy dollars in ones and fives, folded in my front pocket. I slid it under the glass. She counted it twice and handed me fourteen paper wristbands.

I could feel Logan watching me the whole time. He was looking at me in a way I’m not going to forget. Like he was trying to figure something out about me and had just gotten the answer.

“Dad,” he said quietly. “That’s my whole street.”

“Yep,” I said. “Put your wristband on.”