The Edge of the Pool

The order came through on a Tuesday, which is how these things always go. Cain texts the route sheet Monday night, and Tuesday morning you drive.

Address number three was 114 Hollyhock Lane. I knew the street before I saw the number. I'd parked on it plenty of times, two years back, in a different truck.

Andi Bostwick, fifty-three years old, three years a pool man, sat in the cab and did not get out right away. The Craftsman bungalow looked the same. New paint on the eaves, maybe. The big maple still threw shade over half the yard.

And the pool. Well.

You could see it from the driveway, past the fence, and it was green. Not "needs a tab" green. Swamp green. Scum sitting on top in patches like something had been floating there and gone. A skimmer net leaned against the coping where somebody had given up with it.

"Six weeks, easy," I said to nobody. "More like eight."

I thought about driving away. I honestly did. Cain's sheet didn't have a name on it, just the address and "dealer referral, cash." But I knew whose house that was before I read the street number twice.

I got out anyway. Fifty-three is too old to sit in a truck having feelings, and I had a route to run.

The gate latch still stuck the way it used to, halfway, then gave. I stepped through and the smell hit me. Stagnant water, warm, a little sour. I walked the edge once with my hands in my pockets, taking inventory. Leaves in the deep end. Algae on the walls up past the tile line. The pump was off. The timer was off. Nothing about this pool had been touched in a while.

Equipment pad first. That's the rule. You look at the pad before you promise anybody anything.

I knelt down and pulled the cover off the filter, and there it was. DE grids, blown out. Four of the seven cracked clean through, the others caked and sagging. Somebody had run this thing with no pressure relief for who knows how long, and the filter had just quit trying.

"Well, that explains the green," I said.

"You always talk to yourself?"

I knew the voice. I knew the voice before I turned around, and that fact was the entire problem with this job.

Mika Davenport stood at the back door, barefoot, in a gray cotton dress that used to be somebody's nightshirt. Her hair was short now. Cut close at the sides, longer on top, silver where it had been dark. Two years since I'd seen her and the first thing my brain did was note the haircut, which felt like a betrayal by my own head.

"No wedding ring," I noticed. I didn't say that part out loud.

"Andi," she said. Just my name, like it cost something.

"Mika." I stood up, wiped my hands on my thighs. "They didn't tell me whose house."

"I didn't ask who they were sending." She came down the steps and stopped a few feet away, arms crossed, then uncrossed them like she remembered arms crossed was a wall. "I'm sorry. I should have asked Cain to send somebody else."

"He doesn't know," I said. "About us. He knows I dated somebody at the university once. I never used your name."

"He knows my name now, I'd guess, once I signed the work order." She laughed, short and not really a laugh. "God, this is awkward. I'm sorry. The pool, I mean. Not the... well. Everything, I guess."

"How long has it been like this?"

"Six weeks? Seven." She looked at the water and away from it, the way people look at a bill they haven't opened. "It was fine in May. Then it wasn't, and I kept thinking I'd deal with it, and then I didn't."

"Seven weeks of nobody running the pump?"

"The pump broke. A man came out in June, looked at it, said he'd order a part, and never came back. I called two other companies and nobody called me back. Then the neighbor said try Arnold's, they're honest." She paused. "The irony isn't lost on me. Sending you here by accident."

"Nothing about this town is big enough for accidents," I said, and knelt back down at the pad so I had something to do with my hands. "Your filter's dead. The pump might be fine. He was probably right about the part, he just never came back, which is a whole other thing."

"What does that mean, the filter's dead?"

I tilted the housing so she could see. "These are the grids. They hold the diatomaceous earth, the powder that actually catches the dirt. Four of them are cracked. Two more are shot. I can replace them, but it's a couple hours of work, and before I do any of it I have to drain part of the pool. Maybe a foot of water. That green has to go somewhere."

"Drain it," she said immediately. Then, "Wait. Is that safe? The neighbor said something about hydrostatic pressure, popping the pool out of the ground..."

"Not if I leave enough in it, and not with our water table, and not in August. Your pool is fine. It's gunite, forty thousand gallons, it's not going anywhere." I patted the filter housing. "This, though, is on its last legs."

"How much?"

"I'll know better when I open the parts book. Grids run forty apiece. Seven of them, so call it three hundred in parts, plus labor, plus the chemicals to kill what's living in there. Could be six hundred total. Could be eight."

She winced, then nodded. "Fine. Do what it needs."

"That's what everybody says until the invoice comes." I stood up. "I'll write it all down before I start. You sign nothing today. I do the work, Cain bills you Friday, and if you hate the number you can argue with him, not me."

"That's very organized of you," she said, and there was a little of the old tone in it, the teasing one. "You were always organized. Your toolbox had a laminated list in it."

"It still does." And then I regretted saying that, because it told her I still thought about the toolbox and she knew exactly which toolbox I meant.

She went quiet. So did I. Somewhere down the street a lawn mower started up, and the pool made that flat green sound, water not moving.

"I should bring you something," she said suddenly. "Water, lemonade. It's ninety degrees out here."

"I carry a cooler."

"It's ninety degrees and you're about to drain my pool and spend two hours on your knees in my yard. Let me bring you a glass of lemonade, Andi. It's the least I can do."

I wanted to say no. I really did. There's a version of this where I keep my sunglasses on and my mouth shut and get the job done and leave, and two years of thinking about a text message dies quietly in a backyard on Hollyhock Lane.

"I'll take the lemonade," I said.

She nodded and turned for the house, and through the glass doors I saw the inside. Art books stacked on the coffee table. A metronome on the piano bench, the same brass one. One teacup on the counter, one only.

And a man's jacket. Gray, drapes over the back of a kitchen chair like it had been there a while. A jacket that fit somebody bigger than her.

So. Not no ring because she was alone. No ring because whatever this was hadn't gotten to rings yet, or didn't plan to.

She came back out with two glasses, not one, and handed me one. Condensation running down the side. She'd put ice in it without asking, which meant she still remembered I liked it cold enough to hurt.

"Thank you," I said, and drank half of it.

"You're welcome." She held her own glass with both hands and didn't drink. "Andi, can I ask you something dumb?"

"You can ask. I can't promise it's not dumb."

"Why did you say yes? To the lemonade. You looked like you were going to say no."

I set the glass down on the coping, careful, on a dry spot. "Because I'm a grown man of fifty-three and I was thirsty," I said. "That's all it was."

"Okay," she said, in the voice of somebody who does not believe you and is going to let it go anyway.

I got the drain hose out of the truck and started setting up. Behind me, through the glass, I could see her pick up the teacup, look at it, and put it back down in the same spot.

The water started moving. Little by little, the level began to drop.

The level was down four inches when the silver sedan pulled into the driveway. I heard it before I saw it, because I was flat on my back under the filter housing with a wrench, and everything echoes in a backyard.

Two doors. Two sets of footsteps. Then a voice I didn't know.

"There she is," the voice said. "You said the pool guy was here. I brought noodles. And that tofu thing you like from the place on Fourth."

"I said he was coming, not that he was here." Mika's voice, coming from the glass doors. "Jordan, I'm in the middle of something."

"So I'll set it on the counter and we eat late. Hi, pool guy."

I slid out from under the housing and stood up. The man was about my height, younger by a good fifteen years, wearing khakis on a ninety-degree day (who wears khakis to stand in a driveway in August). Neat hair. Neutral face. He had two takeout bags and a smile like a name tag.

"Andi," I said. "Arnold Pool and Spa."

"Jordan. Jordan Robinson." He shifted the bags to one hand and put the other out, and I shook it because I'm fifty-three, not twelve. "Mika's told me about the pool. Well. About the pool disaster."

"It's a swamp with a coping," I said. "But it's fixable."

I looked at Mika over his shoulder. She was standing in the doorway, barefoot, one hand on the frame, wearing that gray dress, and her face was doing nothing at all. That was the impressive part. Two years ago I could read her across a room. Now, nothing.

"We'll eat around seven," Jordan said, to her, not to me. "You want to come look at the drain situation with me first? The guy said the main drain cover might be from the eighties."

"He's the one who'd know," Mika said, tipping her chin at me.

"Right. Pool guy. Obvious." Jordan laughed at his own joke, and I gave him a flat smile, and he went inside with the bags, and through the glass I watched him set them on the counter next to the single teacup, and then put his jacket over the chair, except the jacket was already there, so now there were two.

Mika came out as far as the patio.

"He seems nice," I said, because if I didn't say something I was going to say something worse.

"He is nice."

"That's good. Nice is underrated." I knelt back down at the housing and got the manifold loose, or started to. "This manifold's corroded. I have to force it."

"Andi."

"I'm working, Mika."

She went quiet. Good. I got both hands on the manifold and pulled, and it didn't move, so I pulled harder, the way you're never supposed to, the way every manual says don't, and it came free all at once and my right hand raked across a screw thread sticking out of the bracket. I felt it before I saw it. Then I saw it. A line across my palm, deep enough to be honest about, blood coming fast and running down my wrist and dripping onto the concrete.

"Dammit," I said. Not loud. Just tired.

Mika was there in about two seconds. "You're hurt."

"It's fine."

"Andi, you're bleeding."

"I'm working," I said, and I heard how it came out, hard and stupid, like she was the one who'd put the screw there. She took a half step back. I stood there with my hand dripping and my ears going hot, and Jordan was somewhere in the house probably plating tofu, and I had just snapped at a woman who hadn't actually done anything to me in two years except exist.

I walked to the garden hose by the fence and turned it on low and held my hand in the water. Cold. Good. The cut ran diagonally from the heel of my palm up toward my fingers. Deep enough for tape and butterflies, maybe a look at. Not stitches. Probably not stitches.

I heard her bare feet on the grass. She stopped a few feet away, out of the hose spray.

"I have a first aid kit," she said. "In the hall closet. Gauze, tape, the little butterfly things."

"There's one in the truck."

"Yours is probably ten years old."

"It's three years old. I restock it. I'm organized, remember."

"Yes," she said. "The laminated list."

I rinsed the cut and watched the water go pink and then clear. A drop of blood had gotten on my boot. Somewhere inside the house a cabinet opened and shut. Jordan, hunting for plates.

"I'm sorry," Mika said.

I shut the hose off. "For what?"

"For bringing him out here while you were working. I didn't think. I should have texted him not to come. He does this, he just shows up with food, it's his way of..." She stopped herself. "That's not what I mean. I mean I'm sorry about your hand. And I'm sorry I snapped nothing at you, you snapped at me and I deserved about half of it."

"Which half?"

"The part where you're bleeding because you yanked a corroded manifold like a man in his twenties instead of using the penetrating oil you absolutely own."

I looked at her. She had her arms crossed, and her hair was stuck to her temple with the heat, and she was right, and she knew she was right, and it was the exact voice she used to use when I left tools out. It knocked something loose in my chest I didn't want knocked loose.

"There's penetrating oil in the truck," I admitted.

"I know."

"You don't know. You know nothing about pools."

"I know you." She said it fast, like it slipped, and then her mouth closed and she looked at the pool instead of at me, at the green water with the scum sitting on it, going down an inch at a time. "I know you had a laminated list in your toolbox. That's the entire extent."

The screen door opened and Jordan came halfway out. "Oh, hey, you're bleeding. That looks bad. Mika, the tofu place gave us two orders of the spring rolls by mistake, do we complain about that or accept it as a win?"

"Accept it," Mika said, without turning around.

"Cool. I'll just, uh." He gestured at the door. "Set the table? I don't want to interrupt pool stuff."

"Set the table," she said.

He went in. He was quick, I'll give him that. Either he read the temperature of the patio in