Taking It Read Online Free Page B

“Oh, gee, I think I see what you mean, can you show me again,” so he’ll put his hand on one elbow and stand close, showing you the right grip.
    He had a little tray of what looked like test tubes, fluids he poured into the pool, one after another, screwing the caps back on tight. Then he stirred the water with his hand and used the water vacuum to suck up the dirt and dead stuff that sits on the bottom.
    The pool looks pretty at first glance, but the grill at the bottom is rusting and black, the chrome flaking off. Sometimes I would go out by the pool and stand there, impatient, like he’s wasting my time and I have to be somewhere for supper, like all I want to do is swim my laps and pop into the shower.
    He would look at me and say “hi,” or “what’s up?” but you could tell he would rather stir chlorine into water than get involved with someone ten years younger than he is. Even when I wore the Day-Glo green two-piece he would just kind of squint at me, as though the sun were behind me and he couldn’t see me very well.
    His squinty grin made him look wrinkled. If he kept making this expression he’d look as bad as my aunt in a few more years, but I needed to talk. I get that way from my mother, inherited her need to talk, and my dad says I even sound a little like her, although I can’t hear this myself. I like excitement, but sometimes I can’t shut up.
    â€œDid you always want to work for a pool company?” I said.
    He was over by the end of the pool, where the hot water flows out. I was nowhere near the sun, he could see me fine, but he only looked up once. When you’re in the pool, you can lean against the hole in the wall and the water wells out and feels like a big muscle working there. He was looking down into the workings of the pool heater, a machine that looked like all those pieces of equipment do, pipes and vents, covered with a little dust.
    â€œI don’t work for the company,” he said. “I own it.”
    This did shut me up for a minute, but not because I was impressed. His company logo was the outline of a man carrying a pool on his back, a little-kid-type pool with the water sloshing out. The little man is one of those cartoon figures I can’t stand, where the head is very big and the body very small. The name on the little blue pickup was Aquascan, not a bad name, but the pool man must have made up the cartoon all by himself, or maybe picked it out of a graphics catalog.
    I had to imagine the pool man, Yeah, that looks like a good logo; I want to drive around in a truck with that little man with the big head on it .
    â€œI used to think I wanted to be a teacher,” he said. “I wanted to teach chemistry.”
    I liked chemistry well enough—litmus paper and equations, Mr. Welling handing out quizzes you had to fill in sitting on metal stools, a lab sink and a swan-neck faucet at your elbow. I liked biology a lot more—amoebas and vertebrae.
    My dad called the pool man Barry, and he called my dad Mr. Charles, but as usual I realized I didn’t know very much about this man. I couldn’t just call him Barry. I should call him Mister Something, but that made me feel all the more like someone he wouldn’t take seriously.
    Now that Barry had begun to look at me straight on, I was glad I was wearing that oversize pool robe my mother brought me from Palm Springs, one of those big hooded robes made of the same stuff towels are made of, so you don’t have to dry off; the material soaks up the moisture.
    â€œYour dad be home soon?” he asked.
    It was one of those situations where you try to guess what the questioner wants to hear. My dad was likable, and when he and the pool man talked they seemed to get along fine, talking about how much water gets lost to evaporation and how much because of microfissures in the pool bottom, cracks no one can see with the naked eye.
    But for some reason I had