Blue Chlorine Summer
The baseball landed in the pool with a hollow splash, disturbing the artificial blue that Marcus insisted was just as good as the ocean. I watched it sink slowly, the white leather becoming a ghost against the turquoise tiles.
"That's three," Marcus said, not looking up from his phone. He was forty now, same as me, but he'd cultivated the art of looking perpetually thirty-two through careful grooming and strategic indifference.
"I'll get it," I said, though neither of us had any intention of retrieving it. The ball would sit on the bottom until the pool guy came next Tuesday, another artifact in the underwater museum of their marriage.
We'd been friends since college, back when we both thought success looked like corner offices and season tickets. Now Marcus had the corner office and the tickets, and I had
"You should see Sarah's new place," he said, finally setting down the phone. "Pool, guest house, the works. It's almost like this place."
The way he said "this place" — with that slight hesitation, that barely perceptible weight — told me everything. This wasn't just Sarah's house. This was the house Sarah bought after she left him.
"She's happy?" I asked, though the answer was evident in the way he kept glancing at the sliding glass door, as if expecting her to emerge with a tray of drinks and resume the life they'd built here.
"She's dating someone. A baseball coach, would you believe it?" Marcus laughed, but it was a sharp, brittle sound. "Teaches kids. Probably makes less in a year than I spend on cars."
I thought about telling him that I'd met the guy — that I'd run into Sarah at Whole Foods last month, seen the way she looked when the baseball coach texted her, that genuine, unselfconscious joy I hadn't seen on her face in years. But some truths are too heavy to deliver while sitting beside a swimming pool, beneath a sun that seemed almost judgmental in its brightness.
"You still throw like a girl," Marcus said, nudging my shoulder with his, trying to recover the rhythm of our old banter.
"You still catch like your divorce papers were made of," I started, but stopped myself. Some boundaries shouldn't be crossed, even between friends who've known each other half their lives.
"The pool guy," Marcus said abruptly. "He's the one who told me. About the baseball coach. Sarah hired him for some event at her place. Small world."
He stood up, stretched, and without warning dove cleanly into the pool. I watched him surface, slicking back his hair, treading water in the space where their marriage used to be. The baseball remained on the bottom, a small white planet in its own private universe, waiting for someone brave enough to dive deep enough to bring it back to the surface.