The Swim Lessons I Paid For First

The letter

The checks came on a Wednesday in the middle of June, the first one into the new account at our credit union, with my name on it as payee for Tucker Kuiper and Abe Kuiper.

Eighteen hundred dollars. I stood at the ATM in the credit union lobby and looked at the balance on the little screen until the woman behind me cleared her throat.

Darlis got her letter the same week. I know because she didn’t come to church that Sunday, and she had not missed a Sunday since Harold’s funeral.

She didn’t call. Not that week and not the week after. I picked up the phone twice to call her and put it down both times.

My dad said give her time. My mother, who had been quiet through the whole thing, said the same.

The boys noticed. Tucker asked why Grandma wasn’t at church. Abe asked if we could go see the camper.

I told them Grandma was busy, which was true in its way, and that we’d see her soon, which I wasn’t sure about at all.

I didn’t feel good. I want to say that plainly. I had expected to feel something like relief, maybe something like winning, and I felt neither.

I felt like I’d taken a woman’s last connection to her son and handed it to a government office in Grand Rapids.

Then I remembered the camper. Then I remembered Abe on the bleachers. Then I went back and forth like that for most of two weeks.

Shaye

The swim lessons were sixty-five dollars a boy for a two-week session, ten mornings, forty-five minutes each. I signed them up at the town office on a Monday with the debit card from the new account and the girl at the desk handed me a receipt for a hundred and thirty dollars that I folded and put in my wallet like it was a love letter.

The instructor for Abe’s level was a college girl named Shaye, nineteen, home for the summer from Grand Valley, where she was studying to be a physical therapist.

She had a sunburned nose and a whistle around her neck and a way of talking to scared little kids that I would have given a lot to learn.

On the first day Abe wouldn’t get in. He stood at the edge of the pool with his toes curled over the side and his arms wrapped around himself, shivering though it was nearly eighty degrees, while the other kids in his group splashed around in the shallow end.

Shaye didn’t make a fuss. She just sat down on the edge next to him with her feet in the water and talked to him about his shoes, and his dog, and whether he liked pickles, and after about ten minutes she said, “You want to put your feet in like me?” and he did.

By the third day he was in up to his chest, holding the side. By the fifth day he put his face in the water and blew bubbles and came up gasping and grinning like he’d discovered fire.

I clapped so loud from the bleachers that the lifeguard turned around to look.

Tucker was in the level above him with a different instructor, and he took to it fast. He was out past the first lane rope by the end of the first week, swimming the length of the pool with a kickboard, and by the start of the second week he was doing it without one.

“He’s got a natural stroke,” his instructor told me one morning, a tall boy with a farmer’s tan. “Somebody teach him before?”

“His dad,” I said. “A little. A long time ago.”

That night Tucker asked me to tell him again about the time his dad swam out past the second sandbar.

I told him. He asked me to tell it again. I told it three times before he fell asleep.