"I don't know," Clem said. "Whatever she thinks she's playing."
It was ninety-one degrees by one o'clock, with that thick end-of-summer Kansas air that feels like walking around inside a mouth. The pool was packed. The DJ was playing the same eleven songs he'd been playing since 2019. I was at the grill by the clubhouse with a guy from Sumac Court named Benoit who sold commercial insurance and had very strong opinions about lump charcoal. We were turning out hot dogs and burgers from Association-provided boxes, and I'd checked every box, every bun bag, every jar of relish, because that's what you do when you've lived with this for eleven years. You read every label, even the ones that aren't for you. Especially those.
Clem had eaten at home. Turkey on the safe bread, an apple, a cheese stick. She was in the pool with two girls from her grade, wearing her pouch on its belt under a ratty Royals T-shirt she'd pulled on over her suit, which was her compromise with Rule 11.4: the pouch wasn't a bag if nobody could see it, and if they could see it, she'd point out it was a belt. She waved at me from the deep end at one point and I lifted my tongs at her. That's the last completely ordinary thing I remember from that day. My kid in the deep end, waving. The sun on the water. Benoit saying something about binchotan.
Verlene was everywhere. She had a clipboard and a lanyard and a visor in a color I'd call Flamingo, and she was moving between the DJ tent and the dessert table and the cornhole brackets like a woman running a small war. She had a little boy in tow for most of the afternoon, a skinny kid of six or so with a buzz cut and a Chiefs swim shirt and green goggles pushed up on his forehead so they made his ears stick out. I'd seen him at the pool once or twice before with his parents. Her grandson. Archie.
I heard her tell somebody near the grill, in the carrying voice she used for everything, that her son and his wife were at a wedding in Omaha all weekend and she had "the little man" until Tuesday. I heard her say his mother had sent him with "a whole pharmacy" and a cooler full of "special food" and a list of instructions three pages long. She said it the way you'd describe a car that came with too many cupholders.
"I told her," Verlene said, "I raised Whit on peanut butter and hot dogs and he turned out fine. She gets so worked up. It's a first-child thing. They read everything on the internet."
The woman she was talking to laughed politely, and Verlene squeezed Archie's shoulder, and the two of them moved on toward the dessert table. I'd like to say some part of me heard that and saw what it meant. I didn't. I was thinking about lump charcoal.
The dessert table, I found out later, had been stocked mostly by a bakery in Overland Park that Verlene had used for six years. Cupcakes in the HOA colors, which were green and cream. Sugar cookies shaped like little birds. Lemonade in a glass dispenser with a spigot. But one tray, a half-sheet pan near the end, Verlene had made herself, the night before, at home, because it was her signature thing and she made it for every event: lemon bars, cut in neat squares and dusted with powdered sugar, on a little tented card in her own handwriting that said GLUTEN-FREE LEMON BARS — Verlene's recipe! Two of the board members' wives couldn't have gluten, and two summers ago Verlene had switched her shortbread crust from wheat flour to finely ground almond flour so that they could have some too, and she'd been proud of it. She'd told people about it. She wrote it on the card in smaller letters underneath: made w/ almond flour.
I didn't see any of that. I was forty feet away with a spatula.
What I saw, at 2:41 by the time stamp on the footage that came later, was my daughter climbing out of the pool by the ladder at the shallow end and walking fast, not running, toward the clubhouse awning, with water sheeting off her legs. It was the walk that made me look. Clem doesn't walk like that. She ambles. She drifts. This was a straight line.