The Train of Small Mercies Read Online Free Page B

far as the White House.

Delaware
    E dwin had wanted a pool in his backyard for as long as he could remember. He was only an average swimmer, quick to get breathless, and when he turned his head out of the water, it had a ruinous effect on his stroke; his legs began to sink, his arms went quickly outward, and yet he was able to regain himself when his face turned back in once more. Mostly he preferred soaking or floating on a raft. He wanted a pool not for the exercise but for the status of being a pool owner.
    In his richest fantasy, the pool resembled the Clampetts’ luxurious, statue-lined oasis in The Beverly Hillbillies . In his more modest visions, he pictured the kind Rock Hudson and Doris Day were always luxuriating beside in their movies: rectangular but generously sized, outfitted with a stiff diving board, with a small pool house for changing. But Edwin worked in the payroll department of the sanitation department, and Lolly worked as an X-ray technician at the local hospital. Their combined salaries allowed them a two-bedroom ranch house that was small by most measures, though it managed to suggest a particular, if shabby, charm.
    Edwin still drove a 1958 green Mustang that was unlikely to make another summer’s trip to Rehoboth Beach, where he and Lolly rented an oceanfront hotel room at the Sands for one week a year. Even in the extreme temperatures of August, the water at Rehoboth was frigid—too uncomfortable for Lolly—and the appeals of the boardwalk pavilion had worn thin for her over the many years they’d been going. Without children of their own to accompany, she had become too self-conscious to ride the bumper cars or the Saturn 7, which rocked its passengers up and down with jerky, terrifying thrusts. Lolly had come to think, with some resentment, of their time at Rehoboth as more Edwin’s trip, a chance for him to play arcade games and sit next to kids a third his age on rides and to play in the ocean with the abandon of a child. What she liked to do most was shop for antiques, or rent a bike or search out a garden tour, but these excursions held little interest for Edwin.
    Affording a cement pool was no more realistic for them than buying a seaside cottage, but Lolly had gotten a significant raise earlier in the year, and they could, she said, consider an aboveground one, if they would also put their funds for this year’s Rehoboth trip into it. It would be a way to celebrate her raise.
    â€œYou can still have pool parties with an aboveground,” Lolly said. “It’s still a real pool.” They were sitting in their backyard patio chairs for the first time that spring, and they could hear the rustle of birds once again flying from branch to branch. “They’re probably a little less maintenance. Anyway, something to think about.”
    â€œAbove ground,” Edwin said, inflecting the words with exotic wonder. Their feet were perched on the ottoman, and Lolly gave his foot a slight tap.
    In late May, Edwin bought a model called the Galaxy from the one pool company in town. When completed, it would be eighteen feet long and fifty-two inches tall. In the pool showroom, there was a cardboard cutout, life-size, of a woman in a peach-colored bathing suit standing in the middle of the pool, one hand on her hip, winking. “Let the Galaxy take you to the moon!” she said in a little white bubble.
    After all the materials were delivered, Edwin spread everything out across the back lawn. Their yard was small, and there was little question of the pool going anywhere but in the middle, which Lolly could now see would further dwarf the space. Edwin set himself the task of assembling the Galaxy in a week’s time, as the pool salesman assured him he could.
    He went about the construction with a meticulousness Lolly had never seen in him before. He marked out the pool’s circumference, drawing a line through the grass with a piece of chalk as thick