The Summer He Gave His Mother (When His Family Came First #9)

Chapter 1

GWEN

"You coming, or are you writing a report about it?"

"I'm assessing."

"You're stalling."

She wasn't wrong, so I went. The cold got me across the chest first, a hand pressed flat under the collarbone, and I put my face down and blew the first breath out slow until the water stopped being weather and started being road.

Al had set the near buoy line at four hundred meters, boat ramp out to the swim platform and back, five loops for the distance group.

The bay was flat. Behind the pines the sky was doing that thing where it isn't light yet but everything's got an edge on it, like somebody turned up the contrast without turning up the lamp.

I found my stroke by the second loop and stopped thinking about anything.

Breathing on both sides isn't a virtue, whatever the new people think.

It's a repair. When I came back to the water at fifty I had a body that had forgotten everything except how to hold on, and I breathed right only, so I pulled right only, so I swam in a long patient arc away from wherever I was aiming.

Dot fixed it in one Saturday. You're steering with your lungs, she said.

Breathe both sides. You'll go where you're pointed.

Now half our lane breathes both sides, because I made it a thing.

I came in after the fifth loop with my heart up high in my throat, the good high, the one that means you spent something. Dot was already out, dripping, thumbing her watch.

"Twenty-two flat on the last one. You dropped four seconds off loop three."

"Loop three was garbage."

"Loop three was you thinking about something." She snapped the strap. "Don't think in the water. That's what land is for."

The lot had filled with the usual — hatchbacks with pool noodles in the back, a truck wearing a magnetic sign for a heating company, Pearl's little blue sedan parked crooked the way it's parked every week of its life.

Pearl is sixty-one and widowed a year and change, learning to swim from scratch, which at sixty-one is not a hobby.

She was in the shallows in a suit she still tugs at, doing the drill Al gave her, face in, face out, ten times.

"Morning, Pearl."

"I got to eight." She was breathing hard. "Eight without lifting my head."

"That's two more than Tuesday."

"It is." She looked so pleased I wanted to stand there another ten minutes and watch her do it again.

I didn't have ten minutes. I had a septic company's April to close, a dance studio owner who doesn't believe in receipts, and a chiropractor who pays me in checks he writes wrong.

So I toweled off, pulled sweats on over the wet suit, dropped the cap in the mesh bag with the goggles and drove home with the heat blowing on my hands.

The kit lives by the back door — cap, goggles, the towel rolled the way I roll it, the thermos.

Twenty-nine years in this house and that corner of the mudroom has been the diaper bag corner, the soccer cleat corner, the corner where Marta's viola case sat for six years and got tripped over daily. Four years ago it became mine.

Wade was at the table with his coffee and his boots already on, reading the yard's Monday numbers off his phone the way other men read box scores.

"How was it?"

"Cold. Good."

"Al still doing the platform loop?"

"Five of them."

He whistled low, which is his highest form of praise, and he didn't look up, which isn't an insult. It was a Monday in May. May through September is the season, and I've known that since I was twenty-five and in love with a man who smelled like mulch.

My husband is not a bad man. Saturday he was up at four-forty to put my kayak on the roof rack because I'd said Thursday that I wanted to paddle the north shore, and he's done that for four years without once being asked and without once mentioning it.

He built Marta a loft bed when she was nine that she slept in till she left for college.

He's faithful. He's funny about twice a week, in a low way that sneaks up on you.

In twenty-nine years he has never raised his voice in my direction.

He has also never asked me what I do at dawn.

I said that to Dot once, and she said, neither did mine, honey. Forty-one years. He'd have taken a bullet for me and he never knew my times.

I showered, put my hair up in the clip, and was at the desk in the front room by eight-fifteen, which is where I've been sitting for nineteen years, self-employed, because I wanted my own hours.

Flexible. That's the family's word for it.

Charmaine's been using it since the Clinton administration — Gwen's flexible — and Russ says it long-distance, cheerfully, like a compliment.

Wendell used to say it with a hand on my shoulder, and when Wendell said it, it meant available, and when that family says available what they mean is assigned.

At ten-forty the phone went and it was Lita, three weeks out from a broken hip and the surgery to pin it, eighty-one years old, alone in her house with a walker she despises. Her voice came through the speaker like a woman calling a meeting to order.

"Gwen. The girl at the therapy place moved me to Tuesdays and Fridays without asking. I want you to call them."

"You could call them, Lita."

"They don't listen to me. They use the voice."

I knew the voice. She was right.

"I'll call them."

"And the pills came in the wrong container. They sent the flat kind. I can't work the flat kind with my thumb."

"I'll switch it back to the tall organizer."

"You always know," she said, and then, in that tone that's like a hand landing lightly on the back of your neck, "you're just so good at this. Nobody does it like you."

I said something. I don't remember what.

"Charmaine's coming Thursday to look at the porch step. They're all figuring out the summer. There's some big plan."

"What plan?"

"Oh, don't ask me. They talk over my head like I'm a lamp." A pause, papery. "It'll be a long summer, Gwen. At my age every summer is an inheritance."

She hung up first, the way she always does.

I sat with my hand on the mouse and looked at the calendar taped to the side of the file cabinet, the paper one they give out at the tire place.

April had a circle on the fourteenth — the qualifier, an out-and-back at Kettle Point in water so cold my hands stopped being hands, and I came out of it three seconds under the standard for my age group.

Three seconds that meant nothing to anybody in this house and everything to me.

August had a circle too. The twenty-first, third Saturday.

Five kilometers, open water, the state masters championship, one heat, four hundred swimmers, and a qualification that expires when the season does.

You don't defer it. You either stand in that water on that morning or the whole thing was a nice thing you did once at fifty-four.

And the training is the summer. That's the part nobody outside the sport ever gets. The race is two hours; the summer is the race — dawn swims June, July, August, three weekdays plus the long Saturdays, then the taper, then the sleep, the whole architecture of it.

I came back to the water at fifty, after my mother died, because it was the only place the grief went quiet. Everywhere on land it talked. In the water it held still and let me pull past it. Four years of that, and then this April, the three seconds.

I closed the septic company's April at four-fifty that afternoon. On the nail, the way I've closed every month for nineteen years.

Sunday, Marta called. She calls Sundays around three from her apartment two hours north, usually with the TV muted behind her.

She's twenty-six, gentle, more like her father than she'd care to hear.

We talked about her roommate's dog. We talked about her raise, which she got, which she'd asked for because I made her ask for it.

Then she said, easy as anything, "Oh — Aunt Charmaine sent around the summer schedule for Grandma. You want me to take some shifts? I could probably do a couple Saturdays."

My pen stopped on the pad.

"Say that again."

"The schedule? For the summer." A rustle at her end. "She sent the picture of the whiteboard to me and Dad and everybody. I figured you'd — "

"Marta." I heard my own voice go flat and careful, the one I use when a client says cash and no invoice in the same sentence. "What schedule?"