Mom’s Eight Thousand Dollar Hot Tub

The first Saturday

I want to be clear about this part, because people get it wrong when they tell it. The first Saturday was half my idea, and I half meant it as a joke.

I drove out to Mom’s on Friday after work and said, “You know, you could go use it.”

I expected her to laugh. Instead she went quiet, the way she does when she is thinking, and she stood up from the table and went down the hall to the closet where she keeps the summer things.

She came back with a navy one-piece swimsuit folded over her arm and a swim cap printed with big flowers, pink and yellow and red, the kind they sold at every dime store when I was little.

She held them up like a girl holding up a prom dress.

“I wore this cap to the Wellington pool the summer you learned to swim,” she said. “Your dad used to say I looked like a flower bed walking.”

“Mom, you can’t be serious.”

“I’m seventy-two years old, Sherri. I am too old to be anything but serious.” She put the cap on the table between us. “Eight o’clock tomorrow. I’ll want my coffee first.”

So the next morning at eight o’clock I picked her up. It was cool and cloudy, the kind of gray Kansas morning where the sky sits low over the fields and you can smell rain that never comes.

She had her swimsuit on under a long housecoat and a pair of Dad’s old slippers on her feet.

She carried the cap in her lap the whole way into town, turning it over in her hands like it was something precious.

Mark and Tiffany’s place is a tan-sided ranch house on the east side of town, on a street of low ranch houses, with a tall wood privacy fence around the backyard.

The side gate has a little keypad lock. My hands were shaking when I punched in the numbers.

The gate clicked open. And there it was, on the concrete patio behind the house: a hot tub with a pale speckled shell, steam curling up off the edges of the cover into the cool air. It looked like it was breathing.

I undid the clips on the fence side like Mark said, and folded the cover back. The steam rolled up in a big white cloud.

Mom stood there in her housecoat and looked at it for a long moment, and then she said, “Well. Let’s see what I bought.”

She handed me the housecoat. Then she put on that flowered swim cap, tucking her white hair up under it with both hands, and stepped down into the water one careful step at a time, holding the edge, like she was walking into church.

“Oh,” she said, when she sank down to her shoulders. She closed her eyes. “Oh, Sherri.”

I stood beside the tub in my teal zip-up jacket, my hair pulled back in a ponytail, holding the big striped beach towel I had brought from home.

I was trying very hard not to laugh, and also, a little, not to cry.

That’s when the sliding glass door opened.

Tiffany stood there in a white robe, her highlighted blonde hair loose on her shoulders. She looked at my mother. She looked at me. She did not say a word.

Mom opened her eyes, saw her, and smiled. She lifted one wet hand out of the steam and waved, as friendly as you please, the same wave she gives everyone she passes on the county road.

“Good morning, Tiffany,” she called. “This is just wonderful. You did a fine job picking it out.”

Tiffany stared at her for one more second. Then she slid the door shut.

Mom closed her eyes again and sank down until the water touched her chin. “Thirty minutes,” she told me.

“That’s what it says on the sticker. Half an hour is plenty for a woman my age. Wake me if I fall asleep.”