"I appreciate it."
"It isn't worth much. It was four to zero." She looked back at the clubhouse. "She's not a cruel woman, Ike. I want you to know that. She's just a woman who's never been wrong in front of anybody. It does something to a person."
I paid the fifty dollars. Saoirse wanted me to fight it, and I wanted to fight it, but Clem asked me not to.
"I just want to go to the pool," she said. "I'll eat at home first. It's fine. I'll keep my pouch in my towel. It's literally fine."
"It's literally not fine."
"Dad." She gave me the look she gives me when she's being the adult in the room, which is a look she has been giving me since roughly the age of six. "If you make it a thing, I'm the allergy girl who got her dad to yell at the HOA. I'm already the allergy girl. Can I just be the allergy girl who swims?"
So I let it go. That's what I tell myself happened. I let it go. What actually happened is that I put it somewhere, the way you put a can of enamel on a high shelf with the lid hammered down tight, and you know exactly where it is, and you know that whatever's inside it is still liquid.
The Meadowlark Commons Summer's End Splash was on Labor Day, the last day the pool was open. Verlene had chaired it for six years. It was a production: a DJ under a pop-up tent, a bounce house, a cornhole tournament with brackets on a whiteboard, and a long folding table under the clubhouse awning with what the email called a "Board-provided dessert bar and refreshments, in keeping with Rule 9.2, no outside food please!!" Verlene used exclamation points the way other people use commas.
Saoirse was working. She's an airline dispatcher at an operations center near the Kansas City airport, and on federal holidays she makes time and a half and comes home looking like she's been crying with her eyes open. So it was me and Clem. I'd signed up in June to work the grill for an hour, because they needed dads and I'm a dad who owns tongs. I thought about backing out. Clem said I should go. Clem said if I didn't go, Mrs. Quisenberry would think she won.
"Won what?"