Fourteen Kids at the County Pool

Melissa Dahl was standing at her back gate with one hand on the latch when my son walked up with his towel over his shoulder. She did not open it.

I was in my own yard, maybe forty feet away, rolling up the hose by the garage. It was the third Saturday in June, ninety-one degrees, and the first really hot weekend of the year.

“Logan, honey, I’m sorry,” she said. “You can’t swim here anymore. You’re just too rough with the little ones. We can’t have it.”

My boy stood there in his trunks and flip-flops. He is fourteen, already taller than his mother, with feet like canoe paddles and a voice that cracks when he is surprised. It cracked then.

“I didn’t do anything to anybody,” he said.

“I saw what I saw,” Melissa said. “I’m not going to argue about it.”

Then she turned around and walked back across her patio. Behind her I could hear the pool filter humming and her own boy, Tanner, splashing alone in the shallow end.

Logan came back across the grass between our houses. He didn’t run, and he didn’t cry. He hung his towel over the porch rail very carefully, the way you do when you need your hands to do something.

“Dad,” he said. “She’s keeping the money, isn’t she.”

I didn’t have an answer for him yet. Then I finished rolling up the hose, because I was not going to do anything in that yard I’d have to apologize for later.

The Handshake

My name is Brian Sutter. I’m forty-two. I drive a feed truck for the co-op out of town, mostly bulk deliveries to hog and cattle operations within about sixty miles.

We live on Elm Street in a little town in eastern Nebraska, the kind with one stoplight, a grain elevator you can see from the highway, and a county pool behind the fairgrounds.

Elm is one long block of ranch houses built in the seventies. On a summer night you can stand in the street and count fourteen bikes laying in the yards.

The Dahls moved in next door about six years ago. Craig works at the ethanol plant. Their boy Tanner is the same age as Logan, and those two had been inseparable since the day the moving truck pulled away.

They also have a little girl, Emma, who is six. She follows the big boys around like a duckling and they mostly let her.

Last spring the Dahls put in a pool. It was the biggest thing to happen on Elm Street since the Hansens got a riding mower with a cup holder. Every kid on the block hung on the fence watching.

In early May, Craig came over while I was changing the oil in my pickup.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Craig said. “Tanner’s going to want Logan over every day anyway. Chemicals and electric for the pump are going to eat me alive. We figured about twelve hundred dollars, start to finish.”

“That sounds about right,” I said. My brother-in-law has a pool in Fremont and he complains about the chlorine every Christmas.

“We’re asking the families whose kids are over the most to chip in,” Craig said. “For Logan, three hundred ten. Then he’s got a summer pass. Comes over whenever Tanner’s home. No different from family.”

I told him I’d let Logan decide, since it would be Logan’s money. Craig stuck out his hand and I shook it. That was the whole agreement.

Nothing in writing. You don’t write up a contract with the man whose kid has eaten more of your groceries than your own kid has. That’s not how it works on a street like ours.