Shallow End

The chlorine stung my eyes, or maybe that was just everything. I hadn't seen Mark in seven years—not since the night he fucked my wife in our guest bedroom while I slept down the hall. The baseball game played on the poolside speakers, some distant AM broadcast that crackled like old secrets.

He was older now, thinner, the kind of thin that comes from three marriages and too much scotch. He stood at the deep end of his wife's family's pool, nursing a drink that looked like it could strip paint. The water reflected the fading summer light, turning the surface into something like mother-of-pearl, beautiful and wrong.

"You came," he said, like it was a question.

"Diane said you had cancer." I kept my distance. "Thought I should see if you were actually dying."

He laughed, and it was the same laugh that used to echo across the baseball diamond in high school, the one that made everyone want to be his friend. "Stage four. Liver. Six months, maybe three."

"Good."

"Yeah," he said. "Thought you might say that."

The silence stretched between us, thicker than the humid air. I remembered how we'd been brothers once, how we'd played baseball every summer until our knuckles bled, how we'd promised to be friends forever. The day I found out, I'd taken a baseball bat to his windshield. Fitting.

"Why did you call me?" I asked finally.

He set down his drink and stepped into the pool, slowly, like an old man. "Because I'm going to die, and I wanted someone to give a shit. Not because they're supposed to. Because they actually hate me enough to mean it."

He floated on his back, staring up at the gathering storm clouds. "I was going to tell you that night. I was drunk and stupid and scared. She was lonely. I was lonely. It just happened. I was going to tell you the next morning. I never got the chance."

"You did get the chance," I said. "You had seven years of chances."

"I know." He closed his eyes. "I know."

I watched him float there, a man I had loved and hated in equal measure, dying in a pool that cost more than my first house. The baseball game droned on, some announcer talking about a perfect game, about how rare they were, about how some things only happen once.

I sat on the edge and put my feet in the water. It was warm, like bathwater, like something that had been sitting too long. We stayed like that until the sun went down, two men who had been friends once, sitting in the shallow end while the deep end waited to swallow us both.