t 5:42 in the evening, I walked through my own side gate carrying a five pound bag of sugar from the IGA on Route 9, because somehow our canister at home kept turning up empty, and I found my husband of nineteen years in our backyard pool with the neighbor who had been coming over every Tuesday to borrow that very sugar.
I have replayed that walk from the gate to the patio more times than I can count since then, trying to find the moment where I should have already known. The truth is I think I did know, somewhere under the part of me that still wanted Tuesdays to just be Tuesdays. I just hadn’t let myself say it out loud yet.
The water was the first thing that felt wrong. Not laughter. Not the ordinary splash of two people cooling off after a hot Missouri afternoon. Just a slow, steady slap against the tile, over and over, while the low sun burned across the glass slider and lit up every fingerprint Idris and I had left on it the weekend before, cleaning it together like it mattered.
The yard smelled like chlorine and warm stone and the basil I had planted next to the grill two summers ago, because Idris told me once, in a rare soft mood, that it made the patio feel like something we’d built on purpose instead of something that just happened to us.
We had built that pool on purpose too. Nine thousand dollars we didn’t really have, financed through a home equity loan we were still paying off eighteen months later, forty dollars a month I tracked myself in the ledger I kept for the household because I’ve done the books at the school district office for eleven years and old habits don’t turn off at home. My brother-in-law, Idris’s older brother, poured the deck himself over two weekends because a contractor wanted more than we could spare. It was the one big thing Idris and I had ever built from nothing together, out here on Cutter Road in Hazel Bend, where a family having an in-ground pool at all still counted as something worth mentioning at church.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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