Pool Night Secrets

I woke up on my fifty-third birthday before the alarm went off, which felt like the universe rubbing it in somehow, and I lay there in the gray light coming through the blinds listening to Alma breathe next to me. She was turned away from me, the way she had been turned away for most of the past few months, and I remember thinking that fifty-two had been a long year but nobody had warned me it was going to be a quiet one too.

We met when I was twenty-four, in an evening accounting class at the community college, back when I was trying to talk myself into a life that didn't involve grease under my fingernails. She sat two rows over and asked to borrow a calculator and that ended it, or that was what we always said it was, and three years later we got married at the county courthouse with her sister as witness. In the early years she used to surprise me all the time. She once filled the trunk of my car with balloons for no reason at all, and one year she drove two hours to meet me at a job site with a cooler of fried chicken and a thermos of gin and tonic, which I drank out of a paper cup at two in the afternoon in a parking lot and it is still one of the best meals of my life.

That was the woman I married. The woman I woke up next to that Thursday morning had stopped surprising me sometime around the spring, and I couldn't tell you the exact day it happened, only that one day I noticed the silence and after that I noticed it all the time.

She stirred when I got up but didn't say much. "Happy birthday," she said into the pillow, and I said thanks, honey, and that was the entire conversation before my coffee. I didn't take it personally. That was the trick I had learned, don't take it personally, just get dressed and go to work and tell yourself it's a phase. Fifty-three years old and I still hadn't gotten good at it, but I had gotten practiced.

The shop was the usual Thursday, two oil changes and a transmission that had me swearing under a Camry by ten. Lamar came by around noon with a paper sack under his arm and that grin he's worn the whole ten years I've known him, since back when we were both working for different shops on the same block and he kept borrowing my torque wrench and never giving it back until I threatened to bill him.

"Well look who's still breathing," he said, setting the sack on my workbench. "Fifty-three years old and the state of Nevada hasn't managed to kill you yet. I figured the whiskey might finish the job."

He'd brought a bottle of the good stuff, not the good stuff good, but better than I drink on a Tuesday, and I laughed and told him he was an old man to be talking about anybody dying, seeing as he's got two years on me. He said something about how his two years were quality years and mine were mostly rust, and we stood around the bench for a while talking about a shared customer of ours who thinks a check engine light is a suggestion.

What I didn't tell him, and I don't know why I didn't, was that Alma had barely said two sentences to me all week. It felt like tattling somehow, or like admitting something out loud would make it more true than I wanted it to be at work, so I just let him think everything was fine and clinked my paper cup of shop coffee against his imaginary glass when he toasted me.

"Anything planned tonight?" he asked, screwing the cap back on the bottle after I waved him off, since it was one o'clock and I still had brakes to do.

"Nope," I said. "She's got some conference thing coming up next month, so she's buried in it. Probably dinner at the diner and bed by ten."

"Trent, you're fifty-three," he said, and then he pointed at me with one thick finger. "Fifty-three. You gotta start doing stuff or one day you'll look up and it'll just be the shop and the couch. Trust me on that one, I've seen it happen to better men than either of us."

I told him I'd think about it, which is what I always tell him, and he left, and I went back under the Camry, and I did think about it, down there in the dark with the bolts, about how long it had been since Alma and I did anything at all that wasn't errands.

I got home around six and she was already dressed, which was unusual for a Thursday, and she had that look on her face like she'd been rehearsing something in the car on the way home.

"We have to run an errand tonight," she said. "My sister called. Sondra's girl starts a new school Monday and they got the supply list late, and Sondra's working a double tomorrow, so we said we'd get the stuff."

"Okay," I said, tying my bootlace. "Walmart's open till eleven."

"They don't have everything on the list," Alma said, and she was looking at the wall behind me when she said it, which she'd been doing a lot lately. "The brand of notebook the teacher wants, and those specific calculators. The only place around that stocks school stuff this late is the gift shop at the Oasis. Tony told me they expanded it last year, it's basically a general store now. It's out past the town line but it's open till midnight."

The Oasis was a motel on the edge of town, out where the gravel starts and the streetlights give up, a low peach-colored building with a pool that maybe three guests a year actually swam in. I'd driven past it a thousand times and been inside it maybe twice. The idea that it had a gift shop with school supplies seemed like a stretch, but Alma was already holding her purse and her keys were in her hand, and honestly, a drive after dinner with my wife, even a quiet one, sounded better than the couch.

"Fine by me," I said. "It's my birthday, I'll drive wherever you want."

Something crossed her face when I said that, something quick, and I might say it was guilt but I honestly don't know, I've gone over that moment a hundred times since and I still can't pin it down. She just said, "Great, let's go before it gets too late," and we were in the truck.

It's maybe a twenty-five minute drive out there, all desert and dark once you clear the last gas station, and I had the radio on low and she was looking out her window the whole way. I tried a couple of times to make conversation. I asked if Sondra's girl was excited about the new school, and she said I guess so, and I asked how Sondra was doing since the divorce, and she said fine, and then we were back to the quiet, the tires on the asphalt and the radio murmuring something about the weather two states over.

Fifty-three, I kept thinking. Lamar's voice in my head. You gotta start doing stuff. And here I was doing stuff, sort of, riding shotgun to my own wife on my birthday to buy notebooks at a motel gift shop because it was the only place open. It was such an Alma errand, so practical and so oddly specific, that I didn't question it, and that's the part that gets me now. I didn't question any of it.

The Oasis came up out of the dark the way it always does, this long peach wall and the halogen lamp over the pool buzzing like a trapped wasp, the whole gravel lot lit up orange under it. There were maybe four cars parked along the rooms. Tony was behind the desk when we walked in, the same as always, watching a game on a little TV he keeps propped on a stack of phone books. He nodded at us. He's been there a couple years now, quiet kid, ex-marine, keeps to himself.

"Gift shop's around the side," he said before either of us asked, like he'd been expecting the question. "Open till midnight."

"See," Alma said to me, like she'd won a point. "I told you."

"Before the shop," Alma said, "I want to check in at the desk first." I went along with that, though it surprised me a little, since she'd been in such a hurry all evening. Tony was still behind the desk when we came back in, still watching his game, and Alma said we'd need a room for the night, one room, and I remember thinking that was odd too, because why would we book a room for a school supply run, but I figured she was tired and didn't want to drive back late, and there was a part of me, the birthday part, that liked the idea of not driving back at all.

Tony rang us up without a lot of chatter. He slid a key across the counter, an actual metal key on a big plastic diamond, room 8, and said the pool light had been acting up so if it flickered don't come complain to him at two in the morning. Then he went back to his game and that was the entire conversation, which suited me fine.

On the desk behind him there was an old typewriter, one of those heavy manual ones, sitting next to the register like people still used it. I'd noticed it before on other visits, but this time I noticed the keys, and the E was gone, just a bare little stalk sticking up with a pale circle where the cap should be. The paper rolled in it said something about the pool closing at ten, and the sentence had been written around the missing letter, every E left out, like "thr ar no lifguards on duty." I stood there reading it and Tony glanced over.

"Yeah, been meaning to fix that for a year," he said. "You type an E you just get nothing. Kinda grew on me, the letters it makes."

"Like a ransom note," Alma said, and Tony almost smiled, and that was the end of the desk conversation for real.

Room 8 smelled like bleach and old cigarettes that had been banished years ago, two queens with bedspreads the color of peach sherbet, and a window that looked out over the pool. Alma set her purse on the far bed and stood at the window a minute, and I was unpacking nothing, because we hadn't planned to stay, so I had nothing to unpack, and I said the room was fine and she said yes it's fine, and then we just stood there in a motel room on my birthday with nothing to do in it, and it felt almost like being young again, like we were twenty-four and twenty and hiding out from the world in a cheap room, and that feeling lasted about a minute before she said we should go get the supplies.

The gift shop was around the side, past the pool, which is where I saw the truck. It was a big dark Ford, recent, clean, parked right at the shallow end under the halogen lamp, and I knew a lot of trucks in my line of work and I knew that one. I stopped walking.

"Whose truck is that," I said.

Alma didn't stop walking. She kept going, toward the pool, and she said, "I don't know, probably a guest," in a voice that was so smooth it was almost worse than a bad lie, and I stood there one more second and then I followed her, because what else was I gonna do, stand in the gravel and interrogate her while a halogen lamp buzzed at us.

The lamp over the pool was doing its flicker thing Tony had warned about, buzzing and surging so the water went from lit to dark and back, and the pool itself was that faded turquoise of a place that doesn't get much love, skimmer basket sitting out on the deck, a few leaves drifting in the deep end. There were two plastic lounge chairs, one of them broken in the middle so it made a V, and a little round table with an ashtray full of sand. And there was Lamar, sitting in the good chair, a bottle of the same whiskey he'd brought me at noon open on the table beside him.

He's fifty-five, two years older than me, big shoulders gone a little soft the way mine have, gray coming in his beard, and he's been in my life ten years through the shop and the guys and the poker nights, and in ten years Lamar has never once surprised me, because Lamar is the most predictable man alive, same booth at Conrad's, same hat, same two stories about El Paso. But there he was at a motel pool at nine at night on a Thursday, holding a paper cup of my birthday whiskey.

"Lamar," I said, and my voice came out wrong, higher than I meant it.

He stood up, and he looked nervous, which Lamar never is, and he said, "Hey, happy birthday," like it was a coincidence, the worst acting I've ever seen.

"Hey," I said. "What are you doing here."

Alma was standing between us near the broken