PART 1 — CALL ME TOMORROW
My father has done pools for twenty-nine years.
He can tell you a pump is going by the note it makes from the other side of a fence. He can look at green water and give you the reason before he runs a strip.
Boyd Trayle, Trayle Pool and Spa, one truck, one part-time lad in the summer.
So when my boss asked whether my dad could sort the pool behind his house on Pomeroy Lane, Dad treated it like any other job.
He went and looked at it properly. Plumbing, filtration, pump, the lot. Then he wrote an estimate.
Seven thousand eight hundred dollars.
Dash Cordray read it and agreed to it. He and his wife Sloane both signed it, and both signed the schedule of approved repairs, and both initialled every page, which my father insisted on and which at the time I thought was him being fussy about paperwork the way he is about everything.
The job took nine days.
He replaced the pump. He repaired four sections of pipe. He put in new filtration. Then he treated that water for three days until it went from the colour of a pond to completely clear.
The ninth day was a Saturday and they had thirty people coming that evening, because Sloane had timed the whole job around it.
I was there because my father had asked me to come, which I did not think about at the time and have thought about a great deal since.
He handed the invoice over at about six, on the terrace, with about thirty guests already out there with drinks.
Sloane looked at it.
“Seven thousand eight hundred dollars?”
“That’s what we agreed.”
“For a pool.”
“For the work on the schedule.”
She laughed. Short. “That’s absurd.”
Dad opened his folder and started taking things out. The estimate. The signed authorisation. The approved list.
She did not look at any of it.
She took the folder out of his hands, closed it, and set it down on the table beside her.
Then she turned and looked at me.
“My husband employs your daughter.”
And she said, to a terrace with thirty people on it:
“Give me that. My husband employs your daughter. Think very carefully about how hard you want to push this. Now go home.”
The terrace went quiet.
Thirty people. A woman I know from Dash’s office was six feet away with a glass in her hand.
Nobody said one word.
I stepped forward and said, “Dad, I’ll talk to Dash.”
And my father put one hand up about four inches.
Then he turned and looked at that pool.
He looked at it for what felt like a long time and was probably five seconds. Completely clear. Completely still. Not a ripple on it.
And he smiled.
He said, “All right. Call me tomorrow morning.”
Sloane looked almost thrown by how easily he took it.
We walked to the truck and she called after us, “I’m glad we understand each other.”
Dad did not answer and did not turn round.
I went at him the second we were in my kitchen.
“Why did you let that go?”
He got a drink out of my fridge.
“She owes you seven thousand eight hundred dollars.”
“I heard.”
“She threatened my job. In front of thirty people.”
“I heard that too.”
“Then why did you say nothing?”
He leaned on my counter.
And he said, “Because in the morning those two are going to find out why I made them both sign every page before I put a spade in that ground.”
I said, “What does that mean?”
“Go to work tomorrow.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
I have known Boyd Trayle for twenty-nine years and I know exactly what his face does when he is finished talking.
I barely slept.
My phone went at 7:46.
“Come over.”
“Where are you?”
“Pomeroy Lane.”
“Why?”
And my father said, “Because Dash has just found out what’s under his pool.”
Then he said, “And I’m not here on my own.”
Twenty minutes later I came round onto that street and slowed almost to a stop.
Two police cars. Dash in his driveway arguing with somebody in a county jacket. Sloane beside him in a dressing gown looking nothing like the woman on that terrace.
My father was standing by the pool gate with his hands in his pockets.
And beside him was a woman of about eighty in a dark coat with a thick folder held against her chest.
She saw me pull up and came straight over. Dash saw her go and shouted at her not to talk to me.
She ignored him completely.
I put the window down.
“You work for him?”
“Yes.”
She looked at the house, then back at me, and she said:
“Then I don’t suppose you know why your father made those two sign every page before he touched that ground.”
She opened the folder and handed me one sheet.
I read the top of it twice.
Then I looked at the pool.
It was a photocopy of a page from a state register, dated 1978, with a hand-drawn location sketch on the bottom half and an entry number in the corner.
The sketch had a road on it that is now Pomeroy Lane, and a rectangle on it, and the rectangle sat across what is now the back third of number nine.
I sat in my car on my boss’s street in my work clothes on a Sunday morning holding a piece of paper older than I am.
Beulah Sankey did not say anything while I read it. She has, I learned later, handed that sheet to a great many people over thirty-one years and she has learned to let them get to the end.
Then she said, “Eleven of my family are in that ground.”
I said something useless. I do not remember what.
And she said, “Your father telephoned me on Wednesday evening.”
That is the part I did not know and that took my legs out.
The county had rung the state on the Wednesday afternoon and the state had come back on the Thursday with the 1978 entry and a name on it, and my father had got that name from the county officer on the Friday morning and had rung an eighty-year-old woman he had never met at six o’clock on Friday evening.
He had then spent nine days not telling his own daughter, and three of those days getting a pool clear for a party, and one evening being told on a terrace that he should think carefully about how hard he wanted to push.
Behind us an officer opened the pool gate and Dash started shouting about property lines, and Sloane said his name twice, and my father stood exactly where he was with his hands in his pockets and did not move at all.
