Poolwater

It was 3am and I was sitting in my kitchen holding my pool schedule in one hand and my ex's toothbrush in the other, and I remember thinking this is a weird way to run a business.

The toothbrush was green. Three years, that thing sat in the cup next to mine, and Jordan had been gone four months now and I still hadn't thrown it out. Not because I was sentimental. Because every time I reached for the trash can I got distracted by something on the schedule and forgot, and then it was another week.

The schedule was the real problem. Tuesdays I did the Kessler route, six houses out in the Foothills. Wednesdays was the motel strip on Division. Thursdays I had the country club, which paid the lease on my truck. And Fridays, all day, I had nothing, because the Desert Palms Hotel had dropped me in March and nobody had filled the hole. That was the biggest account I'd ever lost. Well. Second biggest, but we'll get to the first one.

"Get it together, Gordon," I said out loud, to nobody. The cat looked up from the counter where he isn't supposed to be, then went back to ignoring me.

Here's where the business stood. I was forty-four, I owned Grantham Pool Service, one truck, one employee, and a reputation for being the most obsessive chemical-balancer in the Diamondback district. That's not me bragging. That's what the Diamondback Business Journal said when they did that dumb "best of" thing two years ago and I won by eleven votes. I keep the clipping in my truck. Connor thinks that's funny.

Connor. My employee, thirty-one years old, been with me since he was twenty-two, which means he's watched me lose my hair, lose Jordan, and lose Desert Palms, in roughly that order. Good kid. Quiet. Notices everything and says about a third of it.

So that was the 3am picture: schedule with a hole in it, toothbrush I couldn't throw away, and a cat judging me. Then the phone rang, which at 3am is never good news.

"This is Gordon."

"Hi! Mr. Grantham? This is Robbie, I'm the manager at the Sapphire Lounge?" Young voice, fast talker, some kind of accent I couldn't place yet. "Sorry to call so late, we just closed and I'm doing my call list."

"The karaoke bar off Cactus? You opened last month, right?"

"That's us. Listen, I'll be honest with you, our pool is a disaster. It's a showpiece pool, this big shimmering thing, and whoever the contractor hired for maintenance is doing a garbage job. I want quotes. I'm calling everybody."

"Everybody being?"

"You, Xander Anthony, and some outfit called Blue Wave that I already don't like because the guy put me on hold twice."

I sat up straighter at the kitchen table. "Xander Anthony is quoting it?"

"Yeah? Do you know him?"

"We've met." Five years ago, but we'd met. "When do you want me out there?"

"Can you come tomorrow? Friday?"

"Friday works." I looked at the schedule. The hole in it. "Morning's wide open, actually."

"Great, come at ten. Oh, and wear something you can get wet, I'll want you to look at the filter pit."

We hung up and I stood there in the dark kitchen holding my phone, doing the math. The Sapphire Lounge pool was a showpiece. Ten thousand gallons, glass tile, the kind of setup that needs a guy out there three times a week. That was a Desert Palms-sized account. Bigger, maybe. And Xander was already sniffing at it.

You should know some things about Xander Anthony. He's forty-six, owns Anthony Pools, which is the biggest operation in the city, six trucks when I last counted. He and I came up in the same trade shows, the same supply houses, the same everything. And five years ago, at the regional cleaning industry awards, we ended up in the same hotel room. Don't ask me how. Awards night, open bar, he said something smug and I said something worse and somehow that turned into the worst decision of my life, which was also the best four hours of it, and that combination messes a man up. The next morning we had an argument about, of all things, a supply contract, and he walked out and never called again. Ghosted. At thirty-nine years old, ghosted.

So yeah. We've met.

I did sleep, some. Then Friday morning I drove to the shop, which is a two-bay unit behind a tire store, and Connor was already there testing my pH kit like he always does at 8, because he doesn't trust my eyes.

"Sapphire Lounge called me last night," I told him.

"I figured. You came in looking like you had a plan and a grudge."

"I always look like that."

"You look worse today." He set the kit down. "Robbie called Xander too. The supply house guy said Anthony Pools sent a van over there Thursday."

"Good. Let him quote it. I'm still going to beat him."

Connor didn't say anything to that, which is how he argues. He just made coffee.

I was at my desk doing the Sapphire numbers when the door opened without a knock. I knew who it was before I looked up, because only one person on earth walks into my shop like he owns the lease.

"Gordon Grantham." Xander stood in the doorway in a navy polo with the Anthony Pools logo on it, arms spread, grinning. "I heard the sad news about Desert Palms. I wanted to come by in person."

"Did you." I didn't stand up. "Drive all the way over here for that?"

"Well, and to see you. It's been what, five years?" He came in and looked around the office like he was appraising it. "You've got the same calendar. Pool photos. Very you."

"It's a working calendar. What do you want, Xander?"

Connor had drifted to the corner by the parts shelf, arms crossed, watching. He does that when Xander comes up, which is rare, because Xander doesn't come up. He exists in a separate part of my life that I keep in a box.

"What I want," Xander said, sitting down in the chair across the desk without being asked, "is to tell you I'm sorry about the hotel account. Losing a contract that size hurts. I know it hurts." And the smile he put on was the fakest thing I'd seen all year, and this guy invented fake smiles.

"You're sorry."

"Deeply."

"You're quoting the Sapphire Lounge. Robbie told me himself."

"Sure, I am. It's a free market." He spread his hands. "But hey, maybe you'll get it. You've got the obsessive thing going. Ten thousand gallons of glass tile, real delicate chemistry. Be a shame if somebody's test kit slipped."

I stood up. I'll admit that. "Get out of my shop."

"There he is." Xander stood too, unhurried, still smiling. "There's the Gordon I remember. All those years with Jordan and you still got that spark, huh? Or. Wait." He put a hand to his mouth, mock horror. "He left, didn't he. I heard that too."

Connor moved off the shelf a step. I saw him do it in the corner of my eye.

"Out," I said.

Xander walked to the door, slow, and stopped with his hand on the frame. "Good luck Friday, Gordon. Really. I mean it." The grin came back over his shoulder. "You'll need it."

Then he was gone, and his truck rumbled off across the gravel lot, and Connor said, from the corner, "I really don't like that guy."

"Yeah," I said, sitting back down. My hands weren't steady, which made me madder than anything he'd actually said. "Me neither."

I picked up the schedule and wrote SAPPHIRE, FRIDAY, 10AM in the empty slot, hard enough to tear the paper a little.

I got to the Sapphire Lounge at 9:50, which was deliberate, because being early is free and being late costs you. The place looked different in daylight. In the dark it was all neon and music. At ten in the morning it was a big empty room with a bar along one wall, a stage with a karaoke rig, and the pool.

God, the pool. Glass tile, that blue-green color, water so clear it looked shallow when it was eight feet deep. Ten thousand gallons. Somebody had spent real money on it and then hired who knows who to keep it, because there was a haze starting at the deep end and a stain line forming at the waterline tiles. Whoever had it now was losing it.

"You're the pool guy?" A kid came out from behind the bar. Young, maybe twenty-two, tan, moving fast. "I'm Robbie. You must be Gordon, right? Gordon Grantham?"

"That's me." I shook his hand. His grip was quick and dry. "You've got glass tile, Robbie. Who's your current service?"

"Some outfit the old owner used. They're fired as of this week. You're the third quote I'm taking today. You, Xander Anthony, and Blue Wave." He said the name Xander Anthony like it meant nothing to him, which it didn't, and something in my chest unclenched a little. "You want to walk it?"

"I want to walk it twice."

He laughed. "You're intense. Okay. Walk it."

So I did. I skimmed a sample, checked the pH, looked at the filtration room, which was a closet with decent equipment in it and a filter pressure gauge that had been ignored for months. I took notes. Robbie followed me around talking the whole time, about Miami, about the soft opening, about how the karaoke machine had broken twice. He was twenty-two and ran the place like he'd been doing it for twenty years.

At 10:15 the door opened and I knew it before I looked, same as in my shop. Some people you just hear.

"Well, look at this," Xander said. "A pool party and nobody invited me."

"You're quoting it too," I said. "You're invited by definition."

He was in the same navy polo, different day, or maybe he owned six of them. He looked at my notes on the clipboard and then at the water. "Haze at the deep end," he said, to Robbie, not to me. "Waterline stain starting. Whoever had this was robbing you blind."

"I know," I said. "I found it first."

"Gentlemen," Robbie said, and I heard the word carry a load of exhaustion already. "It's ten in the morning. Please don't do this."

"We're not doing anything," Xander said. "We're colleagues." He put a hand on my shoulder. I stepped out from under it. He let me, and I saw him register it.

Robbie walked him through the same walk, and I sat at the bar with my coffee and wrote numbers, and I could hear Xander being charming, telling some story about a resort job, and Robbie laughing because the guy is genuinely funny, that's the unfair part of him. Then they came back and Robbie said, "Okay, so, listen. I'm going to be straight with both of you. Blue Wave is out, I called them this morning. It's down to you two."

"Good," Xander said.

"It's down to you two, and I need a final bid by Monday, noon. All-in. Chemicals, labor, everything. And I'm going to pick based on who I trust with this pool, not just price, because this pool is my whole business. People come here, they take a photo by it, they post it. It's the Sapphire. So. Monday."

"Monday," I said.

"That's fast," Xander said.

"That's my pool," Robbie said. "You want it, you want it fast."

Xander and I left within a minute of each other, and we stood in the parking lot at the same time, which was bad luck or good luck, I still don't know. The heat was already coming off the asphalt in waves.

"So," he said. "Jordan."

"Don't."

"I'm just saying. Four months and you're out here at ten in the morning fighting me over tile. You could take a weekend. You could grieve like a normal person."

"You don't know anything about Jordan."

"I know he was there three years and you put a toothbrush in a cup for three years and now the cup's empty." He said it flat, no smile, and it landed harder for being flat. "Everybody at the supply house talks, Gordon."

"You left," I said. The words came out before I polished them. "Five years ago, you stood in a hotel doorway at six in the morning arguing about a supply contract, and you left, and you never called. You don't get to stand in a parking lot and grieve at me about a cup."

He didn't say anything for a second. The heat ticked under