The Swim Lessons I Paid For First

What she said

She came across the deck slowly, the way you walk into a church you haven’t been to in a while.

Darlis came and stood beside me at the edge of the pool.

Abe was paddling back toward us in the shallow lane with Shaye beside him. When he saw his grandmother, his whole face lit up. “Grandma! Grandma, did you see? Did you see me?”

“I saw you, sweetheart,” she said. “I saw the whole thing. You were wonderful.”

Tucker swam back and hung on the edge beside his brother, and Darlis crouched down, slowly, her knees cracking, and put her hand on top of his wet head, and kept it there for a long moment.

“You swim just like your daddy,” she said. “Did you know that? Chin up, just like him. He’d be so proud of you. He’d be so proud of both of you.”

Tucker looked up at her with water running down his face and said, “Mom told me he swam out past the second sandbar.”

“He did,” Darlis said. “Scared me half to death every time.”

I handed the boys their towels and sent them to the bench by the white table to dry off and eat the granola bars in my bag.

Darlis stood up and we stood together at the edge of the pool and for a while neither of us said anything at all.

“I got the letter,” she said finally.

“I figured.”

“They want to know where every dollar went. Two years of it.” She laughed, a small dry sound with nothing funny in it. “I had to go through my checkbook with a pencil.”

I didn’t say anything. I let her talk.

“There was nineteen thousand in the savings,” she said. “I put it back like they asked. You’ll get it. Most of it was saved, Meredith. I want you to know that. I wasn’t spending it on myself.”

“The camper,” I said.

She was quiet a long moment. “Four thousand down. And the payments, since April. I told myself it was for them. That I’d take them camping like Harold and I took Alden. That it counted.”

She shook her head. “I knew it didn’t count. I knew it when I signed.”

“Why, Darlis?”

She looked at the water for a long time. A little girl went off the low dive behind us and came up laughing.

“Because he was gone,” she said. “Because I couldn’t do one thing about it. I couldn’t fix the tractor. I couldn’t fix that ditch. I couldn’t fix anything. And there was this one thing of his I could hold onto, the checks with his number on them, and I held on.”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “And I told myself you’d make a mess of it. Because of that one check. Because it made me feel like somebody had to be in charge, and it might as well be me.”

“I was a mess,” I said. “You weren’t wrong about that part.”

“I was wrong about the rest of it.” She turned and looked at me. “I’m sorry, Meredith. I’m going to pay back the camper money. Every bit. Two hundred a month out of my own check. I already told them that.”

I believed her. I’m not sure why, except that she was standing at the edge of a public pool in her visor with her eyes red and she hadn’t once looked away from me.

“Okay,” I said.

The camper again

The boys came back with granola crumbs on their chins and Abe threw his wet arms around his grandmother’s waist and soaked the front of her blouse, and she didn’t even look down.

She hugged him back.

“Grandma,” Abe said, “can I swim in a lake now? A real lake?”

Darlis looked at me over his head. I saw her decide something.

“Well,” she said slowly. “I’ve got this camper sitting in my driveway doing nothing. And Silver Lake has a beach with a nice shallow part. If your mom says it’s all right.”

She looked at me again. “I’d like to take them. In July. Just a weekend. If you’ll let me. You could come too, if you want. There’s room for four.”

I thought about it for maybe two seconds. I thought about the money, and the letter, and the woman at the window in Grand Rapids.

And then I thought about Abe swimming in the lake his father had loved, and about Darlis on the beach with her visor, watching him the way she’d watched him from the back of the pool deck.

“Yes,” I said. “We’d like that.”

The boys whooped. Abe started telling Tucker about the tiny sink in the camper as if Tucker had never seen it.

Darlis laughed, a real laugh this time, and put her hand to her mouth like she’d surprised herself.