The Swim Lessons I Paid For First

“Here’s how it works,” she said, when we were done. “We review the request. Generally, a parent who has custody is preferred, and I don’t see anything here that would change that. If it’s approved, the payments will go to an account you set up for the children, with you as their payee. You’ll have to report once a year how the money was used.”

“And Darlis?”

“She’ll get a letter telling her she’s no longer the payee,” the woman said. “We’ll also ask her for an accounting of how the benefits were spent while she was. Any money she saved for the children has to come back, and we’ll see it gets to them.”

I asked how long. She said it varied. Six weeks, maybe. Maybe a little longer.

The whole thing took about forty minutes. When I came back out to the waiting room, my dad was sitting exactly where I’d left him, reading a pamphlet about Medicare like it was the most interesting thing in the world.

“Done?” he said.

“Done.”

We stopped at a diner on Chicago Drive on the way home and he bought me a piece of strawberry rhubarb pie. Neither of us talked about Darlis.

We talked about whether the Tigers would ever hit again and whether the strawberries would be early this year. It was the first meal I had enjoyed in a long time.

Why swim lessons

I knew before the appointment what the first thing would be. I had known since April.

Alden swam like an otter. He grew up a mile from Lake Michigan and he spent every summer of his childhood at Holland State Park, diving off the pier when the lifeguards weren’t looking, swimming out past the second sandbar where the water goes dark and cold.

When we were dating he took me out there on a July night and swam circles around me while I stood up to my waist in the water and shivered.

He laughed at me. He said our kids were going to swim before they could walk.

They didn’t, of course. Life gets busy. Tucker could paddle a little by the time Alden died. Abe couldn’t do anything but hang onto a noodle and scream when water got in his ears.

The spring Alden died he had already looked up the swim lessons at our town pool, the outdoor one past the ball diamonds behind the middle school.

He’d circled them on the calendar on the refrigerator. Two-week sessions, mornings, starting the third week of June. He’d written both boys’ names next to it in his blocky farm-boy capitals.

He never got to sign them up. And the summer after, I couldn’t make myself do it. And the summer after that, I didn’t have the money, because I was paying for after-school care and the furnace had died and the six hundred dollars in the envelope only stretched so far.

Abe was seven now and still couldn’t swim. He was scared of the deep end. He was scared of putting his face in the water.

When his class went to a birthday party at the indoor pool in Holland that winter, he sat on the bleachers the whole time in his swim trunks and a T-shirt, and when I asked him why later, he said he didn’t want anybody to see.

That was what I thought about, in the truck in my driveway after I saw the camper. Not the money. Abe on those bleachers in his T-shirt.