The pouch was faded by fourteen. It had a patch on it of a cartoon sloth hanging from a branch that she'd ironed on in sixth grade and was now too embarrassed to take off and too loyal to replace. Inside it were two auto-injectors in their plastic carrying tubes, a printed action plan folded into quarters, a packet of antihistamine tablets, and usually a lip balm and two dollars.
That was what Verlene Quisenberry had in her hands on the second Saturday in July.
I wasn't there for that part. Clem had walked down to the pool with her friend from two streets over, a towel and a paper sack with a turkey sandwich in it, because she couldn't eat anything at the snack window. The snack window was run by a vendor the board had contracted that spring, and every single thing on its laminated menu was either fried in peanut oil or came out of a wrapper that said may contain. I'd asked. I'd called the vendor myself in June, and a kid had put me on hold and then come back and said, "Yeah, we don't really do allergies."
Clem called me from the pool office at 1:15, and her voice was very flat and very calm, which is how my daughter sounds when she's about to cry and has decided she isn't going to.
"Dad, can you come down. Mrs. Quisenberry took my pouch."
I left a half-gilded window sitting on the easel and drove the six minutes home and the one more minute to the pool. Meadowlark Commons is about three hundred and forty brick-front houses on the west side of Olathe, built in the late nineties, with a stone entrance on 151st Street and a gate that mostly keeps out pizza drivers. The pool sits just inside the entrance, behind a black aluminum fence, with a row of honey locusts along the parking lot. I parked under one of them. I could see my sign from the lot. Navy on white. The keyline looked good. I remember thinking that, even then, and being annoyed with myself for thinking it.
Verlene was in the little pool office behind the front desk, sitting in the lifeguard manager's chair with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She was sixty-four that summer, trim and tanned, with a white-blond bob that never moved. She'd been president for six years, on the board for eleven. She wore, that day and nearly every day I ever saw her, white capri pants and a sleeveless top in some color you'd find on a paint chip with a name like Sea Glass or Hydrangea, and a big canvas tote with her monogram on it in navy thread.
Clem was standing against the wall by the first-aid cabinet with her towel around her shoulders and her arms folded over it. Tuck Mattox, the head lifeguard, who was nineteen and home from K-State for the summer and built like a refrigerator somebody had taught to swim, was hovering in the doorway with an expression I can only describe as apologetic on behalf of the entire adult world.
The pouch was on the desk, unzipped. The two pens were out of their tubes, lying side by side on top of a clipboard, like exhibits.
"Mr. Benedetti," Verlene said. "Thank you for coming. Please sit."