Page 18 of The Kitchen Contract

I crumple up my paper towel napkin and lob it at her. She swats it away and waggles her finger at me. “Don’t be a sore loser.”

I don’t feel like a loser at all. Sitting here with her, full and happy, I feel like a big-time winner. But I pout a little anyway, just to be playful, until I remember something.

“Hey, did you bring your bathing suit this time?”

“I did, actually. Are you wanting to swim right now?”

“Why not?”

She glances out the French doors. “It’s almost dark outside.”

“So we’ll turn on the outside lights,” I say with a shrug.

She hesitates, her lips pressed together, then she nods and reaches for her bag. “Let’s do it.”

“Great. Meet me outside once you get changed. You can use the hall bathroom.” I stride away to my bedroom without waiting for a response. It only takes me about two minutes to pull on my trunks, grab a couple of clean towels, and hurry back out. As I pass the hallway bathroom, the strip of light under the closed door tells me that she’s still changing. Good. I want to beat her outside.

On the patio, I flip on the floodlights that face the pool, then plug in the string lights that crisscross the patio below the ceiling fan. With the turn of a few knobs, the gas fire pit roars to life. The resulting ambiance is exactly how I wanted it to be. Hopefully Nora will like it.

The click of the door latch makes me turn, and I watch Nora step out in a light purple one-piece bathing suit with only one shoulder. A soft gasp falls from her lips as she gazes around with appreciation.

Setting her pile of clothes on one of the patio chairs, she sweeps her waist-length hair up on top of her head in a messy knot, exposing the graceful curve of her neck. The glow of the lights and the fire plays across her skin, highlighting her features and kindling a spark in her eyes that makes her look ethereal.

“It’s even more beautiful out here at night,” she comments softly.

You’re even more beautiful at night. What would she do if I said that out loud?

Before I can decide whether or not to find out, she grins and asks, “Are we swimming or what?”

“Right this way, my lady.” I bow and gesture gallantly for her to precede me down the flagstone path to the pool.

The water is a smooth, dark mirror with only the flood lights on the side of the house illuminating it. I drop the towels onto a lounge chair beside the pool and tug my shirt over my head. The heat of the day has given way to the cool of evening, though a bit of early summer warmth still lingers. The night is filled with the sound of cicadas and the scent of recently mowed grass.

“Last one in is a rotten egg.” Without waiting to see how Nora responds to my challenge, I take a running start and tuck my knees to my chest, cannonballing for all I’m worth. I come up grinning, treading water and looking for Nora. She’s at the shallow end of the pool, stepping in daintily with her arms crossed over her chest.

“What are you, ten?” she calls, but there is no venom in her words, only amusement. I float lazily toward her.

“What’s the point of being a grown-up if you don’t do the things you want to do? This is the whole reason I got a house with a pool, so I cannonball anytime I want.”

She takes another step down and stops. There are two kinds of people in this world, I’ve realized. One type likes to jump straight into the water with the goal of complete and immediate immersion. The other type wades in gradually, acclimating slowly and carefully to the temperature change between land and water. Nora is obviously the second type. I am most assuredly the first.

But I won’t rush her. There’s no wrong way to get in a pool as far as I’m concerned, except maybe falling in accidentally with all your clothes on.

She takes a final step, her feet now firmly on the bottom. “When I was a kid, my mom used to buy Raisin Bran cereal.”

I cock an eyebrow and wait for her to continue, wondering where this is going.

“I hated the raisins, so I would eat them first and then enjoy my bowl full of bran. Then one day when I was about twenty, I was in the grocery store and I saw a box of plain bran cereal—no disgusting raisins—and I bought three boxes.” She smiles. “It’s nice to be an adult and do things the way you want to do them.”

She moves over to where I’m now leaning against the side, my elbows propped up behind me on the wall, and mimics my pose. She lets her feet float up and her toes peek out of the water in front of us, painted a dark color that I suspect is purple. It seems to be her favorite color.

“Sometimes I’ll hear people say things like, ‘I wish I could be a kid again,’ and I always wonder why,” she continues. “I mean, it’s not like I had a bad childhood or anything. Nothing particularly traumatic happened to me. But I like making my own decisions, and that’s not something you get to do much as a kid.”

“What if you make bad decisions, though?” I ask without thinking. Her face is shadowed by the lights behind us, so I can’t read her expression as she considers my question. Hopefully my face is similarly obscured so she can’t tell how anxious I am about her answer to what is a personal inquiry for me.

“Of course you’ll make some bad decisions. That bran was terrible. Never buy off-brand bran,” she says with a shudder. I laugh, but my chest tightens at that answer. I wonder what she would think of me if she knew that I was thinking of a bad decision way worse than over-purchasing gross cereal. One that nearly broke my family.

But I don’t want to think about that right now, and I certainly don’t want her to know about my worst moments. So I do the mature thing and hoist myself out of the pool to do another cannonball.

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