“I’ll take it. I want to leave this on. Cut the price tags off.” She took my money and gave me change and found some scissors and cut the tags off the suit and robe and then I stuffed my clothes into a bag and walked out of the shop and down a hallway to the pool. I stepped out onto the blue-tiled patio. The Olympic team was just beginning to leave. I watched them gather up their things and put them in their bags. They looked so happy. So powerful and useful. I was a swimmer, I wanted to tell them. I can swim the five-hundred-yard freestyle in 6:53. I can swim the hundred-yard butterfly in 1:28. If I hadn’t quit I could have trained for the Olympics. I could swim with you.

I must have been staring at them because a boy in a pair of blue trunks walked over to me. “Do you need anything? Are you looking for us?” Two girls about my age were beside him. Their shoulders looked as powerful as my father’s. They were deeply tan. “Come on, Robbie,” the tallest one said. “We have to get back to the rooms.”

“No, I was only watching you,” I answered the boy. “It looks great. You looked like you were really swimming.”

“It’s a great pool. We’re lucky to have it in Houston.” He moved off with the girls. The rest of the team and their trainers left in groups. I looked up at the balcony. My father was leaning over it, watching me. I put the robe down on a beach chair and dove into the deep end and began to swim. I swam for an hour and then I went upstairs and we ate dinner and I fell asleep reading a book. Across the River and into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway. I turned to the place where I had stopped reading it that morning on the plane. “Then she came into the room, shining in her youth and tall striding beauty, and the carelessness the wind had made of her hair. She had pale, almost olive colored skin, a profile that could break your, or anyone else’s heart, and her dark hair, of a thick texture, hung down over her shoulders.

“‘Hello, my great beauty,’ the Colonel said.”

* * *

When I woke the next morning, Daddy was dressed and talking on the phone to his mine foreman in Tennessee.

“I love you for doing this for me,” I said. “I’ll never forget that you did it.”