"It hasn't said anything yet," I said.
"Then maybe it's not going to." She tapped her glass with one fingernail. "Or maybe you haven't been there at the right time. Either way, Mireya, you have a boy who needs you more than that pump house does."
She was right. I knew she was right. By the time the next summer came around, I had mostly stopped climbing the step stool. I was working more shifts because a travel therapist had quit, and Nico had a summer job at a bike shop on Arizona Avenue, and the fine had been referred to a collections attorney who sent me a letter every six weeks in an envelope that looked like a jury summons. I had decided, more or less, to let the pool be somebody else's problem.
And then, on the second Thursday in July, I looked over the wall at the right time.
It was a hundred and thirteen degrees that afternoon. I remember because the number was on my phone's lock screen when I woke up at four-thirty from my post-shift sleep, and I remember thinking that the weather app had started putting little red warning triangles next to the temperature as if any of us needed to be told. I'd worked Tuesday night and Wednesday night and I was off until Saturday. Nico had come home from the bike shop at three and was on the couch with his feet on the arm, which he knows he's not supposed to do, watching a video of somebody restoring a 1970s BMX frame.
"There's leftover enchiladas," I said.
"I ate them."
"All of them?"
"There were only, like, six."
I made coffee, which is what you do when you work nights and wake up at four-thirty in the afternoon, and I took it out to the back patio, where the shade was a lie but the misters still worked. The misters hiss. That's why I heard the truck before I saw it, because the misters stopped for their timer cycle and in the silence there was the beep-beep-beep of something backing up in the common area.
I stood on the step stool. I'm not going to pretend I didn't.