A couple of years ago, my parents died in a car accident.
It was a Tuesday in March. It was raining. A truck crossed the center line on Route 9, and that was it. The police officer who came to my apartment was very young. He kept taking his hat off and putting it back on while he talked.
I was twenty-seven. My sister, Emma, was fourteen.
One day I was her older brother. The guy who showed up for Thanksgiving, slept on the couch, stole the last slice of pie, and drove home Sunday afternoon.
The next day, I was signing her school forms. Talking to lawyers. Learning her medical history from a folder my mother kept in the kitchen drawer. Finding out she was allergic to penicillin and had braces until she was twelve and needed new glasses every eighteen months.
And trying to remember whether we had enough milk for breakfast.
I became her legal guardian because there was nobody else who made sense.
Our grandparents were gone. Our aunt lived in Arizona and had three kids of her own and a husband who was sick. My dad’s brother offered, over the phone at the funeral home, but we both knew he didn’t mean it. He meant it the way you mean it when you say let me know if you need anything.
So it was me.
I moved back into our parents’ house. My old bedroom still had my high school track trophies on the shelf and a poster of a band I’d forgotten I ever liked. I slept in there for four months before I could make myself sleep in my parents’ room.
I don’t regret any of it. Not one day.
But I learned very fast that loving a kid and knowing how to raise one are two completely different things.
The first night, I made spaghetti.
It was the only thing I knew how to cook. I boiled the noodles too long, and they turned to mush. I burned the garlic bread. The sauce came from a jar, and I didn’t heat it all the way through, so it was lukewarm in the middle.
Emma sat across from me at the kitchen table. In our mother’s chair. She hadn’t said much since the funeral. She pushed the mushy noodles around her plate with her fork.
“This is really bad,” she said finally.
“I know.”
“Mom put sugar in the sauce. A little bit. To make it less sour.”
“I didn’t know that.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“I don’t know either,” she said. “I don’t know any of her recipes. I never paid attention. I thought I’d have time.”
And then she started crying. Right there at the table, over the terrible spaghetti.
I didn’t know what to do. I got up and went around the table and put my arms around her, awkwardly, the way you hug somebody at an airport. She cried into my shirt for a long time.
The next day, I found our mother’s recipe box in the cabinet over the stove. Index cards, in her handwriting, some of them with grease spots. I sat on the kitchen floor and read every single one.
That weekend, Emma and I made our mother’s spaghetti sauce together. With a little bit of sugar.
It wasn’t as good as Mom’s. But it was close.
Those first months were rough.
I was working as an assistant manager at a hardware store. I got the job two years before and didn’t love it, but it paid okay. After the accident, I had to switch to the morning shift so I could be home when Emma got out of school.
I didn’t know anything about being a parent. I didn’t know you had to sign a permission slip for a field trip. I didn’t know you had to go to parent-teacher conferences. I forgot the first one completely, and her English teacher called me, and I said, “Oh, I’m her brother,” and there was a long silence on the phone before she said, “Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry. I heard.”
I didn’t know fourteen-year-old girls needed so many things. Shampoo, but a specific kind. Deodorant, but a specific kind. Pads. I stood in the drugstore aisle for twenty minutes staring at pads, completely lost, until a lady who worked there took pity on me and asked who they were for.
“My sister,” I said. “She’s fourteen. Our parents—” I stopped.
The lady didn’t make me finish. She picked out three packages and put them in my basket and patted my arm and walked away.
I didn’t know how to talk to Emma about boys, or friends, or grief, or the kids at school who suddenly didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t know how to help her with algebra, because I’d barely passed algebra myself.
I got a lot of things wrong.
But Emma made it easier than she had any obligation to.
She rarely asked for anything.
That was the thing that got me the most. She was fourteen, and then fifteen, and then sixteen. Her friends had new phones and name-brand shoes and went on trips with their families to the beach. And Emma never asked for any of it.
She knew money was tight. Even when I tried really hard not to let her know how tight.
My parents didn’t have much life insurance. Enough to pay off the house and put a little aside for her college. That was it. The rest had to come from my paycheck.
I remember one night, about a year after the accident, I was sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of bills and a calculator. I thought Emma was asleep. I was rubbing my forehead and muttering numbers to myself.
She came downstairs for a glass of water. She saw me. She saw the bills.
She didn’t say anything. She got her water and went back upstairs.
The next week, her school sent home a form for a class trip to Washington, D.C. Three days. Four hundred dollars. She was so excited about it. She’d been talking about it since September.
I found the form in the recycling bin. Folded in half. Unsigned.
“Emma,” I said at dinner. “Why is your D.C. form in the trash?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t really want to go.”
“You’ve been talking about it for months.”
“I changed my mind.”
I looked at her. My fourteen-year-old sister, looking down at her plate.
I signed the form that night. I put it in her backpack. I picked up four extra shifts at the hardware store to pay for it.
She came home from D.C. with a little plastic model of the Lincoln Memorial and a T-shirt for me that said MY SISTER WENT TO WASHINGTON D.C. AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.
I still wear it.
This summer, though, she wanted one thing. Badly.
A pool.
It was the hottest summer I can ever remember. Weeks of it. Every day over ninety. Some days over a hundred. The grass in our backyard turned brown and crunchy. The asphalt on the street got soft. The weatherman on Channel 4 started looking genuinely worried every night.
And our community pool, the only public pool in town, had closed for renovations. Right as the heat started. They were putting in a new filter system. The sign on the gate said REOPENING AUGUST 1ST, which was about as useful as a sign that said NEVER.
For about two weeks, Emma and her best friend, Sophie, complained. Constantly.
Sophie had been Emma’s best friend since the first day of kindergarten, when she walked up to Emma on the playground and said, “I like your shoes. Do you want to be sisters?” She lived three streets over. She was tall and freckled and laughed like a car alarm. After our parents died, Sophie slept over at our house almost every weekend for six months. She never asked if she could. She just showed up with her sleeping bag.
“We are actually melting,” Emma announced one afternoon.
The two of them were lying on the living room floor. Directly in front of the box fan. Like two starfish.
“You’re sitting in front of a fan,” I said.
“It’s blowing hot air.”
“That’s still air.”
“It’s disrespectful air,” Emma said.
Sophie nodded very seriously. “She’s right. It’s rude.”
“We need a pool,” Emma said. “A real one.”
“We’re not getting a pool, Em,” I said. “An above-ground pool is like four hundred dollars. Plus the water. Plus the chemicals. It’s not in the budget.”
Sophie sighed. “My parents said the same thing. They said if I want a pool so bad, I can pay for it myself.”
Emma didn’t argue with me.
She just lay there on the floor in front of the fan, looking at the ceiling. Thinking.
That should have warned me. When Emma doesn’t argue, it means she already has another idea.
The next morning, I came downstairs at seven, and she was already gone.
I found her a few minutes later. Two houses down. In Carl’s front yard.
Carl is our neighbor. He’s about seventy-five. A retired landscaper with a gray crew cut and forearms like tree trunks. He’s lived on our street for forty years. After the accident, he brought us a casserole every Sunday for two months. They were terrible. Emma and I ate every single one.
Emma was standing in his front yard, talking to him. Carl was standing on his porch in his bathrobe, holding a cup of coffee, looking amused.
When I got close enough to hear, Emma was saying, “Twenty dollars. And I’ll do the edges. And I’ll bag the clippings.”
Carl looked at his lawn. Then at Emma.
“You know how to use a push mower?”
“I’ve watched my brother do it.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I’m a fast learner.”
Carl looked at me over Emma’s head. I shrugged.
“Twenty dollars,” Carl said. “But if you run over my petunias, it’s fifteen.”
She didn’t run over his petunias.
She mowed Carl’s whole lawn in two hours. It took me forty-five minutes when I did ours, but I didn’t say anything. She came home sweaty and sunburned with grass stuck to her legs, holding a folded twenty-dollar bill like it was a winning lottery ticket.
That same week, Sophie started walking dogs.
Three dogs, for a lady on her street who worked long shifts at the hospital. A golden retriever named Pancake, a beagle named Lucy, and a very old, very fat dachshund named Senator who refused to walk more than half a block.
“I have to carry Senator home,” Sophie told me. “Every single day. He just lies down on the sidewalk and looks at me.”
And then they started doing everything.
They washed cars. They made a sign out of poster board, CAR WASH $10, and set up in our driveway with two buckets and my garden hose. The first day, they washed six cars. They also washed each other, the mailman, and me.
They pulled weeds for Mrs. Patterson across the street. She paid them in cash and lemonade. She also made them listen to stories about her late husband’s time in the Navy. They listened to every single one.
They babysat. Two little boys named Caleb and Mason, ages five and seven, who lived at the end of the street. According to Emma, the boys spent six straight hours trying to hit each other with plastic swords.
“Six hours,” Emma said, collapsing on the couch that evening. “Six. They never stopped. They never got tired. How do they not get tired?”
“Did anybody get hurt?”
“Sophie got hit in the face with a sword.”
“Is she okay?”
“She said it was the most honest thing that’s happened to her all summer.”
They walked more dogs. They mowed more lawns. They helped Carl paint his fence. They organized Mrs. Patterson’s garage, and found a box of her husband’s old Navy letters, and she cried and gave them each an extra twenty.
Some evenings, Emma came home so tired she could barely stand. Sweaty, sunburned, covered in dirt. Holding a folded twenty-dollar bill.
“Still worth it?” I’d ask.
“Absolutely,” she’d say. Every single time.
They kept their money in separate envelopes.
That was my idea. I insisted on it.
Emma’s envelope was yellow. She wrote POOL FUND — EMMA on the front in purple marker. Sophie’s was blue. Hers said SOPHIE’S POOL MONEY DO NOT TOUCH with a drawing of a skull and crossbones.
They kept both envelopes on Emma’s dresser. And every Sunday night, the two of them sat on Emma’s bedroom floor and counted their money. Out loud. Twenty by twenty. And wrote the new total on a sheet of paper taped to the wall.
“You’re making this very official,” Emma told me, rolling her eyes, the first time I insisted they keep separate envelopes.
“Money gets weird when people don’t keep track,” I said.
“It’s a pool,” she said. “Not a corporation.”
“Humor me.”
She humored me.
I don’t know why I was so insistent about it. Maybe because of Dad. He used to say that money was the fastest way to ruin a friendship. He lent his best friend three thousand dollars when I was a kid, and they never spoke again.
Or maybe I just had a feeling.
By the end of the first month, the envelopes on Emma’s dresser were getting thick.
Emma counted her bills every Sunday like she was checking on something much bigger than a pool. Like she was watching something grow.
I didn’t really understand it until one Sunday night in late June.
I walked past her bedroom door. It was open a crack. Sophie had gone home. Emma was sitting on her bed alone, holding her yellow envelope in both hands.
She wasn’t counting. She was just holding it.
“You okay, Em?”
She looked up. She was quiet for a second.
“This is the first thing I ever bought myself,” she said. “Like, really bought. With money I earned. Not money from you. Not money from Mom and Dad.”
She looked down at the envelope.
“Mom always said I’d be good at saving money,” she said. “She said I was the careful one. I wish she could see this.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just stood in the doorway.
“She’d be really proud of you, Em,” I said finally.
Emma nodded. She put the envelope back on the dresser.
“I know,” she said. “I just wish she could tell me herself.”
For almost two months, the girls saved.
And finally, at the end of July, they had enough.
Not for anything fancy. A small above-ground pool. Twelve feet across, three feet deep. Blue vinyl, with a metal frame and a little filter pump. Emma had researched every single one online. She’d read every review. She’d made a spreadsheet.
It cost four hundred and twelve dollars with tax.
Emma paid two hundred and six. Sophie paid two hundred and six.
We drove to the store on a Saturday morning in my truck. Emma and Sophie counted out their money at the register in twenties and tens and a few crumpled fives. The girl at the register was very patient.
When we got home and I lifted the huge box out of the back of the truck, Emma put her arms around it.
She actually hugged the box.
“I bought something expensive,” she said.
“You bought half of something expensive,” I said.
“Still counts.”
Our backyard wasn’t ideal.
That was the problem.
It sloped badly down toward the back fence. The only flat part was right next to the house. And it was too small. A twelve-foot pool would’ve hung over the edge of the slope.
“We could level it,” I said, looking at the yard. “Maybe. It’d take a lot of work, though. And dirt. And money.”
Emma’s face fell.
“Sophie’s yard is flat,” she said.
It was true. Sophie’s house had a big, wide backyard. Mostly level. Plenty of room.
“Would her parents let you put it there?”
“Sophie already asked,” Emma said. “They said yes.”
Sophie’s parents, Greg and Melissa, seemed happy about it.
I’d known them for years. Greg sold commercial insurance and wore a lot of golf shirts. Melissa worked part-time at a dentist’s office and ran the PTA fundraiser every year. They were the kind of parents who always had the nicest car at school pickup and the biggest Halloween decorations on the street.
They’d been nice to us after the accident. Melissa brought a lasagna. Greg came to the funeral. They let Sophie sleep over at our house all those weekends.
We weren’t close. But they’d always been fine.
That Saturday afternoon, Greg helped me carry the big box into their backyard.
“This’ll keep them busy all summer,” he said, grunting under the weight.
Melissa was on the patio with a glass of iced tea.
“And save us from hearing about how hot they are,” she said. And laughed.
The girls did most of the setup themselves.
They laid out the ground cloth. They unfolded the blue liner. They read the instructions out loud to each other, step by step, very seriously, like surgeons.
I helped with the metal frame. It had about forty pieces that all looked exactly the same. Greg connected the garden hose. Melissa brought out a pitcher of lemonade and sat on the patio watching.
It took about four hours.
When the pool finally started filling up, Emma and Sophie stood next to it, side by side, watching the water rise. They were both grinning so hard it looked painful.
Sophie held up her hand.
“Official rule,” she said.
Emma high-fived her.
“Half yours,” Sophie said. “Half mine. Forever.”
Emma laughed.
“My dad said we can keep our pool here,” Sophie said. “As long as we want.”
I remember that sentence. I remember it exactly. Because Emma repeated it later that night, while she was texting Sophie from her bed, and I was walking past her room.
At the time, none of it seemed important.
For the next couple of weeks, the girls used that pool almost every single day.
Emma walked over to Sophie’s house every morning after breakfast. She came home around dinner. Sunburned, waterlogged, smelling like chlorine. Happy.
Sometimes Sophie came to our house instead. The two of them would lie on our couch in front of the box fan, still wet, dripping on my cushions, and I’d pretend to be annoyed.
“It’s still disrespectful air,” Emma would say.
“Go back to your pool, then.”
“We need a break from the pool.”
“You can’t need a break from a pool.”
“You can if you’ve been in it for six hours.”
Everything was normal. Everything was fine.
And then, last Saturday, Sophie texted Emma a little before lunch.
want to come swim?
Emma grabbed a towel. She threw it over her shoulder. She yelled, “Bye!” from the front door.
She left around noon.
She was back less than an hour later.
I was in the kitchen making a sandwich. I heard the front door open. I heard it close. Harder than usual.
I looked up.
The second I saw her face, I knew something had happened.
“Em? What is it?”
She walked into the living room. She dropped her towel onto the couch. It was dry. She hadn’t even gotten in the water.
“Sophie’s parents won’t let me swim,” she said.
I frowned.
“What?”
“They said I can’t use the pool.”
She looked embarrassed. That’s what made me angry, before I even understood what had happened. That she looked embarrassed. Like she’d done something wrong.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s on their property.”
I thought she must have misunderstood something. I put down the sandwich.
“Where’s Sophie?”
“Inside. They made her go inside.”
“Did you two have a fight?”
“No.”
“Did you break something?”
“No.”
“Did you do anything? Anything at all? Leave the gate open? Track mud in the house?”
“No.” Her voice cracked. “I didn’t do anything. I just walked into the backyard. And Melissa was out there. And she said I couldn’t swim today. And I asked why. And she said, Because we’re using it today. And I said, That’s okay, I’ll just swim with you guys. And she said no.”
“Then what exactly did she say?”
Emma wiped at her face with the back of her hand.
“She said since the pool is in their backyard,” Emma said slowly, “they decide who uses it.”
I stared at her.
“Did you tell her you paid for half?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She said buying it doesn’t mean I own their backyard.”
That answer was clever enough to tell me Emma probably hadn’t misunderstood anything at all.
“Stay here,” I said. “I’m going to go talk to them.”
“Don’t,” Emma said. “Please. Don’t make it weird. Sophie’s my best friend.”
“I’m not going to make it weird. I’m just going to talk.”
She looked at me. She didn’t believe me.
I walked the three streets over to Sophie’s house.
I rang the front doorbell. Nobody answered.
I rang it again. Nothing.
Then I heard laughter. Coming from behind the house.
I walked around the side of the house, along the driveway, to the tall wooden fence. There was a gap between two of the boards. I looked through it.
Greg and Melissa were in the pool.
The girls’ pool.
Greg was standing in the middle, in his swim trunks, holding a beer. Melissa was floating near the edge on a pink inflatable lounge chair with a cup holder. There was a glass of white wine in the cup holder. Music was playing from a little speaker on the patio table.
Two other adults I didn’t recognize were sitting on the edge of the pool with their feet in the water. Friends of theirs, I guessed. They were laughing about something.
I stood there and looked through that gap in the fence for a long time.
Then I called Greg’s name.
Greg looked over.
“Oh,” he said. “Hey.”
“Can we talk?”
He didn’t look embarrassed. That was the thing. He didn’t look guilty or caught. He looked mildly annoyed. Like I’d interrupted a nice afternoon.
He climbed out of the pool slowly. He set his beer down on the edge. He grabbed a towel from a lounge chair and walked over to the gate. He opened it.
Melissa stayed in the water. On her pink float. She didn’t get up.
“Emma says you told her she can’t use the pool anymore,” I said.
Greg shrugged. He dried his hair with the towel.
“We’re setting some boundaries,” he said.
“Boundaries?” I said. “Around something she paid for?”
“It’s in our yard.”
“She paid for half of it.”
“We know,” Melissa called from the pool. She laughed a little. Like it was funny.
I looked at her.
“Then I’m confused,” I said.
“There’s nothing confusing about it,” Melissa said. She took a sip of her wine. “It’s our property. We decide what happens here.”
“And Sophie?” I asked. “Can Sophie use it?”
“She’s our daughter,” Greg said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
Greg folded his arms across his chest. He looked at me like I was being difficult on purpose.
“Look,” he said. “We allowed them to put it here. As a favor. But we’re the ones giving up yard space. That’s our lawn under there. It’s going to be dead by September. We’re paying for the water. That’s a big water bill, you know. We’re maintaining the area. We’ve got to mow around it. Clean the filter.”
“Emma cleaned the filter,” I said. “Every other day. I watched her do it.”
“That doesn’t change where it is.”
“And the girls do the chemicals. They bought the chemicals. With their own money.”
“That doesn’t change where it is,” Greg said again. Slower. Like I was a little kid.
Behind him, one of the friends on the edge of the pool had stopped laughing. She was watching us. She looked uncomfortable.
I could feel myself getting angry.
It started in my chest and climbed up into my face. My hands were in fists at my sides. I didn’t remember making them into fists.
I wanted to yell. I wanted to tell Greg that my sister had spent two months mowing lawns and walking dogs and getting hit in the face with plastic swords to pay for the pool his wife was floating in with a glass of wine. I wanted to tell him Emma had hugged the box. That she’d held her envelope and said, This is the first thing I ever bought myself.
But something about the smugness on his face made me stop.
Because I realized arguing wouldn’t fix anything.
Greg wasn’t going to change his mind because I yelled at him. He’d just yell back. And then Melissa would get out of the pool and yell too. And the friends would watch. And then Emma and Sophie would be caught in the middle. And Sophie would get in trouble at home. And Emma would lose her best friend.
And the pool would still be sitting in their backyard.
So I took a breath.
And I said, “Okay.”
Greg looked surprised.
“Okay?”
“Yep,” I said.
And I turned around and walked home.
Emma was waiting in the kitchen. Sitting at the table with her knees pulled up to her chest.
“What did they say?”
“The same thing they told you.”
Her face fell.
“Were they in it?” she asked. “The pool?”
See more on the next page