The Swim Lessons I Paid For First

The fence

Darlis was standing at the back of the pool deck, by the chain-link fence that runs along the park side. She must have paid at the gate and walked in while I was watching Abe. She had on a white visor and a sleeveless blue blouse.

Her short gray hair was flattened a little at the sides under the visor. One hand rested on the white table the lifeguards use, the other hung at her side.

She didn’t come closer. She didn’t wave. She just stood there and watched.

I don’t know how she knew. Maybe one of the church ladies had seen us. Maybe she’d driven past the pool every morning for two weeks and I’d never noticed.

I didn’t know what she wanted. For one bad second I thought she had come to make a scene.

But she didn’t move. She just stood with her hand on that table and looked at Abe in the water.

Abe hadn’t seen her. He was looking at me, and then at Shaye, who leaned close to him and said something I couldn’t hear. He took a big breath. He let go of the edge.

“Kick, buddy,” Shaye said. “Long arms. Just like we practiced.”

He kicked. His arms went around in big clumsy circles. He went under once, about a third of the way down, and my heart stopped, but he came back up spitting and blinking and he didn’t grab for anything.

He just kept going.

Tucker let go of the edge and swam beside him, slowly, staying even with him the whole way. He wasn’t helping.

He was just there. And he swam the way he’d figured out how to swim that week, his chin lifted up out of the water, his eyes straight ahead.

I looked back at Darlis. Her hand had tightened on the table. Her mouth was moving a little, like she was saying something to herself.

Abe touched the far wall at the deep end. He grabbed the edge and turned around and screamed, “I did it!” so loud that every kid in the shallow end stopped splashing, and then all of them started cheering.

The lifeguard blew her whistle twice, which wasn’t a rule, just a celebration.

I stood up with both towels in my arms. I was crying. I didn’t care.

And Darlis took a breath and called my name across the deck.

“Meredith.”

I walked over. I didn’t hurry. I stopped an arm’s length from her with the towels against my chest and we looked at each other across that white table.

“He swims with his chin up,” she said. She was looking past me, at Tucker in the deep end. Her voice cracked on the last word.

“Tucker. He swims with his chin up out of the water. Alden did that. Every summer, his whole life. I used to tell him he looked like a seal.”

“I know,” I said. “I saw.”

“Nobody taught him that.”

“No.”

She pressed her lips together. Under the brim of the visor I could see her eyes were wet.

I nodded toward the pool.