The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  “How come you didn’t tell me you were coming inside? I was worried about you.”

  All the ladies are watching us. When we turn towards them, they pretend to be doing other things.

  “I did tell you,” my mother says. “You were underwater, though.” She unwraps the towel from her body; she is wearing her bathing suit. “I just wanted to cool off.”

  I’m not going to fight her. I walk through the twisted lines of lockers. My mother stops in front of Peg, who is hoisting up her underwear. “Give Tommy time,” she says. “He’ll come around.”

  Outside my mother sits on the edge of the shallow end, dangling her feet. When she really gets hot she sits on the first step of the pool and lets her butt get wet. When I see her there I swim up underwater and grab her ankles. She screams. “You shouldn’t sit here,” I tell her. “All the little kids pee in the shallow end.”

  “Think about it, Rebecca. Won’t it make its way to the deep end, then?”

  I try to remind her that this is a concrete pool; that she will be able to grab the edge of it the entire way around if she chooses to get wet above her waist. “It’s less deep than the Salt Lake, and you were doing the backfloat there.”

  “I did that against my will. You tricked me.”

  She exasperates me. I breaststroke away from her, diving over the blue and white bubble-string that separates the shallow from the deep end. I slide my belly down the concrete ramp and touch the drain of the pool. I run out of air and push off the bottom, roll onto my back. The clouds are stuck in the sky. I can make out all kinds of shapes: beagles and circus acts, lobsters, umbrellas. With my ears tucked under the surface of the water, I listen to my pulse.

  I backfloat until I crash into a woman wearing a bathing cap with plastic flowers. Then I tread water. My mother isn’t on the steps anymore, and she isn’t sitting on the edge of the pool. I glance around wildly, wondering where the hell she’s gone this time. And then I see her, chest-high in the water. With one hand she’s grabbing onto the ledge of the pool, and with the other hand she’s grabbing the blue and white string of buoys. When she gets to the other side she lifts the heavy line and ducks under it. I’ll bet she doesn’t hear the kids squealing, or the slap of thongs on puddles. I’ll bet she isn’t thinking of the heat. She grabs onto the edge of the pool again and slides one foot down the ramp of the deep end, testing her limits.

  34 SAM

  “So these two guys open a bar together,” Hadley says, and then he stops to take a drink of his beer. “They go through this whole big deal cleaning up the place and stocking it and then comes the big opening day. They’re waiting together for a customer, and in walks this grasshopper that’s six feet tall.”

  “Here we go,” says Joley.

  Hadley laughs and sprays beer all over my shirt.

  “Jesus, Hadley,” I say, but I’m laughing too.

  “Okay, okay. So there’s this grasshopper—”

  “Six feet tall—” Joley and I yell out at the same time.

  Hadley grins. “And it sits down at the bar and orders a vodka tonic. So the guy who’s waiting on him goes up to his buddy and says, ‘I don’t believe this. Our first customer is a grasshopper.’ And they have a few laughs and then he goes back to the grasshopper with his vodka tonic. And he says, ‘I can’t believe it. You’re our first customer and you’re a grasshopper.’ And the grasshopper says, ’Yeah, well.’ So the bartender goes, ‘You know, there’s a drink named after you.’”

  Joley turned to me. “This is going to be a disappointment. I can feel it.”

  “Shut up, shut up!” Hadley says. “So the bartender goes, ‘You know-’”

  “There’s a drink named after you,” I say, prompting him.

  “And the grasshopper says, ‘That’s ridiculous. I’ve never heard of a drink called an Irving’” Hadley finishes the joke and then hoots so loud the whole place is looking at our table.

  “That’s the dumbest joke I’ve ever heard,” Joley says.

  “I have to agree,” I tell Hadley. “That was pretty stupid.”

  “Stupid,” Hadley says, “but real fucking funny”

  Of course anything’s funny when you’ve had about ten beers apiece and it’s after midnight. We are onto our stupid joke contest: the one to come up with the stupidest joke gets out of paying the tab. We’ve been here for a while. When we first got here, around nine-ish, there was next to no one in the bar, and now it’s packed. We’ve been keeping tabs on the women that come in-no real lookers, yet, but it’s been getting darker, and everyone’s getting prettier. It will probably keep up like this for another hour: we’ll tell dumb jokes and talk about the women behind their backs and none of us will do a damn thing about it, so we’ll leave just the three of us and wake up alone with hangovers.

  We come here every few weeks-everyone’s welcome who works in the fields, to talk about their gripes at a place where it’s common knowledge the boss is buying. Some of the guys make up complaints just for the free beer. The meeting starts unofficially at nine, and usually by eleven-thirty most of the others have cleared out. From nine to ten we actually do discuss the business of the orchard: on my end, I tell everyone about the revenues and the new costs, or about meetings I’ve had with produce buyers, and the guys from the field talk about getting a new tractor, or division of labor. They’re the only guys I know of in an orchard who haven’t unionized, and I think it’s because of these conversations. I don’t know that much ever gets done—money’s tight—but I think they just like knowing that I am willing to listen.

  It always ends up with me, Hadley and Joley-most likely because we all live in the Big House, we all drive down here together, and we all have nothing better to do. We participate in the obligatory dumb joke event. We put quarters in the jukebox and talk about whether or not Meatloaf songs really belong with the oldies—Joley says yes, but he’s five years older anyway. Hadley finds some girl and talks to us for about three hours about how he’d like to dance with her and do other unmentionable things, but he chickens out halfway to her table and we get to rib him about it. If Joley has enough to drink, he’ll do his Honeymooners imitations and his best turkey call. Is it any wonder that I’m always the one who drives us home?

  “So tell us about your sister,” I say to Joley, who returns from the bar with three more Rolling Rocks.

  “Yeah,” says Hadley. “Is she a babe?”

  “For Christ’s sake. She’s his sister”

  Hadley lifts his eyebrows—this is a real effort for him by now. “So what, Sam? She’s not my sister.”

  Joley laughs. “I don’t know. I guess it depends on what you call a babe.”

  Hadley points to a girl in a red leather dress, leaning on the bar and sucking on an olive. “That’s what I call a babe,” he says. He purses up his lips and makes kiss noises.

  “Will somebody get that boy laid?” Joley says. “He’s a walking gland.”

  We watch Hadley stand (almost) and make his way towards the red-leather girl. He uses the backs of chairs and other people to steer by. He makes it all the way to the bar stool next to her, and then turns to look at us. He mouths, Watch this. Then he taps the girl on her shoulder and she looks at him, grimaces, and flips the olive into his face.

  Hadley reels back to our table. “She loves me.”

  “So your sister will be getting here soon?” I ask. I haven’t any idea, really. Joley brought it up once, and that was it.

  “I figure five more days, maybe.”

  “You looking forward to seeing her?”

  Joley sticks his thumb into the neck of an empty green bottle. “Like you don’t know, Sam. It’s been so damn long, with her out in California.”

  “You guys pretty tight?”

  “She’s my best friend.” Joley looks up at me and his eyes are bare, the way they get that makes people so uncomfortable around him.

  Hadley sits with his cheek pressed into the table. “But is she a babe? That’s the question.”