Chlorine Regrets

The public pool at 6 AM was a church of chlorine and echoes. I'd been coming here since the divorce—since Amanda took the house and the goddamn cat—swimming laps as if I could outpace the paperwork and the lawyer's bills. Forty-five, starting over in a studio apartment with boxes I hadn't unpacked.

I surfaced after my twentieth lap, gasping, and saw it: a cat crouched on the deck chair nearest the shallow end. Not ours. ours was a tortoiseshell named Maddy who'd shredded my favorite armchair. This was a scraggly tom with one ear, watching me with yellow eyes like it knew something about failure.

"Hey, buddy." A sixty-something in Speedos set down his towel. "That yours?"

"No." I treaded water. "I'm allergic."

The old guy laughed. "You're in the wrong place then. My wife feeds strays behind the community center. They're everywhere these days."

I thought of Maddy, how Amanda had insisted we adopt her "for the kids" even though the kids were teenagers who barely came home anymore. How the cat had become a pawn in the negotiations: Amanda got custody, I got biweekly visitation rights I'd never used.

"My daughter plays softball," I said suddenly, maybe because the old guy's towel had a Yankees logo. "Used to, anyway. Before she decided I was too embarrassing to be around."

"Teenagers." He shook his head. "My boy's thirty-two and still won't speak to me. Not since I told him he couldn't quit his job to 'find himself.'"

I pushed off the wall, beginning another lap. At fifty meters, I remembered: the last baseball game I'd attended, Tommy's championship, how Amanda had called during the seventh inning to say she wanted a separation. How I'd sat through eight innings, cheering, pretending my chest wasn't caving in.

The cat was still there when I finished—sleeping now, trustingly oblivious. A bear of a man in the next lane overpowered me, his strokes violent and practiced. He kept catching up, passing, lapping me, like he had something to prove.

"You're favoring your left side," the old guy said when I finally dragged myself out. "Hurt your shoulder?"

"Old baseball injury." I rubbed it. "College. Thought I was going pro."

"We all think that at twenty." He wrapped his towel around his waist. "Then life catches up."

The cat stirred, stretched, looked at me through one half-open eye.

"You want him?" the old guy asked. "He's been coming around for weeks. My wife would kill me, but..."

I considered it—really considered it. A stray cat. A company in the empty apartment. Something that needed me, even if it was just food and a warm corner. Maddy's successor.

"No," I said finally. "I can't."

"Your loss." He gathered his things. "See you tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Tomorrow."