The Pool Guy Came Tuesdays, and by July It Wasn't the Pool novel · Chapter 14 of 24
Chapter 14: Abuela
Nico's POV
She didn't take my clothes off on Sunday.
She lay on the cabana daybed in her robe with her head on my stomach and asked me questions.
It took me a while to notice, because in ten weeks she had never asked me one.
Where did I grow up? Mesa, off Dobson, in my abuela's yard.
What did my mother do? She did hair, out of the kitchen.
What was I saving for? A route of my own, a hundred pools, my name on the truck.
"Which name?" Joelle said to the roof.
"Mine."
"Good," she said, and then, "My birthday's the fifteenth. I'm going to be thirty-six."
"That's not old," I said.
"It's not young," she said, and laughed, and her whole head moved on my stomach.
Her hand lay on my belt and did nothing.
When I told her my abuela turned eighty on Saturday, and that my mother was feeding half of Mesa, she went quiet.
"Nothing leaves the yard," she said, after a while.
"Those were your terms."
"I know whose terms they were."
She looked up at me.
"Take me," she said.
I didn't say anything for a moment.
"To Mesa?" I said.
"To Mesa. I'll bring a dessert."
She brought a kringle.
It was a Wisconsin pastry, flat and oval and as long as her arm, and she'd had it shipped in a box with ice packs from a bakery in Racine.
She carried it across my abuela's yard on Saturday night in a green sundress with her hair down and no claw clip.
It was a hundred and four degrees at six, and there were forty people in the yard.
My cousins had the grills going under the mesquite.
There was a tent with misters, and the speaker on the shed was playing the same norteño my uncle had played at every party since I was born.
My mother was at the comal in the kitchen window, slapping tortillas, and she saw us come through the side gate.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Pool Guy Came Tuesdays, and by July It Wasn't the Pool are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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