Don, I Left as You Wished novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: Coming Soon

The next text came in while I was still staring at the sign.

"THEY PUT A FENCE ON OUR POOL."

Then: "Who do I kill. Give me a name."

Then: "Don't answer that, my phone's on the family plan."

Santo sat up and read it over my shoulder.

His face went very quiet. That was worse than angry, on him.

"Twenty-seven minutes," I said, and got out of his bed.

I was on the bathhouse sidewalk by nine.

The fence was real. The sign was real.

A city tag on the gate said the building had been secured as an unsafe structure by an approved contractor.

The approved contractor was Torrisi Construction.

"They're not even hiding it," Joanie said. "They hired themselves to lock us out."

A crowd was building on the sidewalk.

Kids from the Red Hook houses on their bikes. Parents with coffee. The grandmother from the first day, in a church hat, because it was Sunday.

A boy put his hand through the chain link and touched the bathhouse step he couldn't reach.

Somebody had already taped a drawing to the fence.

A blue rectangle with stick figures in it, and four wobbly lines. LANE FOR, in green crayon.

I looked at it for a long time.

Santo stood at the back of the crowd with his hands in his pockets.

He'd come in his own car. He hadn't said a word since the bridge.

"Coach," the bus-driver father said. "What now? Coney till it gets cold, then what?"

Everybody looked at me.

Then the phones came up, because somebody always starts filming.

I climbed up on the low wall by the fence, so the back row could see.

"How many of you have kids who can swim now?" I said. "Who couldn't in May?"

Hands went up. A lot of them.

"Labor Day," I said. "The city decides who gets this building on Labor Day."

"We know," somebody called.

"So on Labor Day morning, Lane Four swims here."

"Here where? It's fenced."

"From Governors Island," I said. "Across the channel to Red Hook. The big kids swim the half mile with lifeguards on kayaks. The little ones swim the last hundred yards inside a rope, with a coach each."

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