Every Saturday morning, while the rest of our neighborhood slept in, my husband Chuck would be outside before eight o’clock, cleaning the pool.
I’d stand at the kitchen window with my coffee and watch him. Skimming leaves off the surface in long, slow sweeps. Vacuuming the bottom. Scrubbing the waterline on his knees with a stiff little brush. Holding the chemical test tubes up to the sunlight and squinting at the colors like a scientist.
By lunchtime, he’d finally lean against the pool net, wipe his forehead with the back of his arm, and grin at me through the screen door.
“Now it looks effortless,” he’d say.
I’d bring him a glass of lemonade.
“It looked effortless before,” I’d tell him.
“Exactly.” He’d point the skimmer pole at me like a teacher with a pointer. “That’s because you didn’t see the work.”
Forty-one years, he said that. Every single Saturday.
I didn’t understand what he meant until five years after he died, when my next-door neighbor and her sixteen-year-old son spent four hours and thirty-seven minutes finding out for themselves.
My name is Abigail Lindqvist. Everybody calls me Abby. I’m sixty-eight years old. I taught third grade for thirty-four years at Pine Hollow Elementary, and I can still silence a room with one raised eyebrow.
Chuck built that pool himself.
The summer of 1985. We’d been married six years and had a three-year-old daughter, Phoebe, and a baby on the way, and a backyard that was mostly crabgrass and a rusty swing set. Chuck was a civil engineer for the county. He spent his days designing drainage ditches, and he came home one night in May and said, “Abby, I’m going to build us a pool.” 