His kid and my kid swim together

Practice is at 5:55 and Fedor locks the doors at six, so 5:40 in the lot is the whole system. You need those fifteen minutes because there's one way in off the back and if a bus is sitting in it you're out on the street watching the clock run.

Mondays and Wednesdays are mine. Tuesdays and Thursdays are Rob's. Fridays were supposed to float and then they never did, because Owen had the orthodontist every other Friday through the fall, so Fridays came to me, which put me at three days a week and him at two. I told him it didn't matter to me. He was still bringing it up in January.

Nobody takes gas money. I tried to hand him two twenties in November and he wouldn't have it, and then right before Christmas I found forty bucks folded under my parking brake and I didn't say anything about it and neither did he. Our mothers both go to St. Charles. His mother sends food home with him too, which I didn't find out until a Tuesday.

Mason sleeps in his suit. He pulls it on under his sweats the night before so he can be out the door in four minutes, and I've told him that's disgusting, and he does it anyway. He's fourteen. Him and Owen have been in the same lane since they were nine and they text each other from across a room.

Me and Steph, that wasn't anybody's fault. I mean that. She didn't do anything. I didn't either, really, unless you count fifteen years of getting home at seven and putting the TV on and that being the whole night.

I swam at a little school down past Mansfield, division two, back in the nineties. I've still got the shoulders and there's about forty pounds sitting on top of them now, so what it looks like is a guy who used to do something. I'm at that natatorium three mornings a week and I haven't been in the water since 2004.

I sell parts. Undercarriage and final drives mostly, excavators, and my territory runs out past Medina, and my first call is Chuck at a rental yard in Brunswick at eight sharp. So after drop-off I sit in the lot with the engine going and do my route on the phone. Rob does something at the county engineer's office and he's not due anywhere until 7:30. That's two vehicles idling forty feet apart for two hours every single morning, and that went on about a month before he came over and knocked on my glass with a coffee from the Marathon on State.

He got in. We talked about the water main they had torn up on Ridge and whether the Browns were going to take a quarterback. Then he put his hand on my leg above the knee and left it there and neither one of us said anything, and twenty minutes later the boys came out with their hair frozen.

That was the last week of October. It happened in the lot a couple more times and then he said his place is four minutes from the pool and practice is two hours.

His house is a ranch off Grantwood. There's a beagle named Sadie who's sixteen and won't get up for anybody. On the wall by the phone there's a calendar from a plumbing outfit, and the fridge has Owen's ribbons on it going back to when he was eight, even the sixth place ones. Coffee's on a timer, so it's already made when we come in.

We go in the bedroom for a while and then we sit in the kitchen. He tells me about his ex, who moved as far as Strongsville. I tell him about my mother's knee and about a Kubota final drive that came in with the wrong bolt pattern twice from the same warehouse. That's the part I think about at work.

Denise is Steph's sister and she does attendance at the high school, which is the same building the club rents the pool in, and her window looks straight out at that lot. At Thanksgiving she got going about me and Rob being an old married couple with all the driving, and my mother thought that was funny. Everybody in that club has some version of that joke.

Owen slept over the first Saturday in February. They were on the laptop until two in the morning watching a guy build a hut out of mud with no tools, and I made them eggs at noon like it was any other thing.

My mother sent me home in January with stuffed cabbage in a Cool Whip container and I still haven't taken it back. It's in the back seat. She asks about it every time I'm over there, and I say I've got it right in the car, which is true.

Then the club sent the email on a Thursday night. The filtration's getting redone and the high school pool goes down the first week of March, so starting the week after Presidents' Day the senior group is at a pool in Berea, three to five in the afternoon, through the middle of April at least. The mothers had a new chain worked out on the group text before I finished reading it. Kathy Sobol's doing Mondays. Mason asked me from the back seat who was driving and I said the moms have it.

There's no 5:40 anymore.

I was at Rob's that last Tuesday and we didn't say anything about it. He's on the same email I'm on. We talked about whether Owen ought to go out for water polo in the spring, and he made eggs, and I ate them standing at the counter because I always do. I left my travel mug on the drainer. I could have picked it up. I didn't, and then I got my coat and we drove back over.

Friday was the last 5:40. I dropped Mason and then instead of going back out to the car I went in through the side doors and stood on the deck, which I haven't done since he was in the eight-and-unders. Same smell. There's tape holding the lane ropes together. Mason's got a garbage catch on his left side, he drops that elbow every stroke, and he's going to go a one-twenty in the hundred free anyway.

Eighty-two degrees in there. I'm telling you, you can't train a kid in that.