"I was the one vote against," she said. "I want to say that, not because I'm proud of it, but because I didn't do enough with it. I asked one question and I accepted a shrug for an answer. I watched this young woman"—she nodded at me—"ask a dozen more, and get fined for it, and I told her to let it go. I said that the data would either speak or it wouldn't. That was wrong of me. Data doesn't speak. Somebody has to keep standing on the stool until it does." She folded the paper in half without having read it. "I move that this association formally rescind every fine and suspension issued to anyone who complained about the pool, with refunds, and send a written apology to each of them. Including the Sotelo family, wherever they live now."
Someone seconded it before she'd finished sitting down. It passed with one abstention. Mr. Darrow.
I didn't speak at that meeting. I'd meant to. I had notes. But when Odalys Restrepo asked if anyone else wanted to say something, and a dozen people turned in their chairs to look at me, I found I didn't want to be the person who stood up at the front of the clubhouse and was right. Glynis had said that, on the asphalt. That's what you want. You want to be right. She'd been wrong about almost everything, but she'd been in the neighborhood of something true there, and it had stayed with me. So I shook my head, and the meeting moved on to the question of who would sit on the interim board, and my name came up, and I said I'd think about it, and I'm still thinking about it.
Yesenia Sotelo called me the following week. She'd gotten Fern's letter and a check for three hundred dollars and twelve cents, the twelve cents being interest, which Fern had insisted on calculating herself. Yesenia talked for a long time, mostly in Spanish, which she switched into when she was upset and which I followed well enough. Alma was eight now. Her eyes were fine. She was afraid of pools, though, all pools, even the one at her cousin's apartment in Casa Grande, and she cried when Yesenia tried to take her to swim lessons. Yesenia had talked to a lawyer. She didn't know yet if she'd sue.
"I'm not angry at the old man," she said. "I'm angry at the lady. She told everybody my daughter did it. With sunscreen. My daughter thought it was her fault for a year."
"I know," I said.
"Is she going to jail?"
"I don't know," I said, which was the truth. Glynis's attorney had entered a plea of not guilty and was, I'd heard, talking with the prosecutor about something else. Everett's diagnosis was in the court file now. Everyone's secrets were in a court file now.
"If she says sorry to Alma," Yesenia said, after a long time, "maybe. I don't know. Maybe I listen."
The pool reopened on the last Saturday in September. A company called Bluewater Desert Pool Service, licensed, bonded, insured, with its certifications laminated and screwed to the outside of the pump house door, had spent three weeks replacing the chemical feeder, flushing the lines, and putting in a ventilation fan and a locked, separated storage cabinet for the acid, with a red sign on it that said ACID ONLY, and a yellow one on the other cabinet that said CHLORINE ONLY, and a third sign, between them, in letters four inches high, that said NEVER STORE OR POUR TOGETHER. Fern inspected it personally. She said it would do.