“Fellas, any takers?” Mona drops her robe at the edge of the pool and steps down the underwater stairs, doing her best sea-nymph impression. Her legs tremble with booze and the change in buoyancy. Behind her, another pair of women walk in, tentatively in step like amateur synchronized swimmers. “We brought trunks!” another guest—Helen Walsh, the pitching coach’s wife—yells and waves a pair like a flag. Stephen’s trunks. He recognizes others in the stack: they’ve raided his closet. “Stevie,” Mona says from the pool, submerged up to her shoulders, her body a ghostly mint color, “you don’t mind, do you?”

“Sounds fun.” Stuart Walsh is drunk enough to think it’s a good idea to get in. He grabs the pair out of his wife’s hand. “I’ll be right back.”

Within ten minutes there are a dozen people in the pool. Pandemonium, splashing and the kinds of shrieks you’d expect out of preteens on the hottest day of summer. The Walshes are playing a game of chicken with Ronnie and his new girlfriend. Goodyear’s in the shallow end with Dorsey, the athlete sulking and the manager well on his way to being drunk. Stephen can’t help noticing the athlete’s one visible tattoo, a jack of diamonds inked over his heart. Strange, that; Jason didn’t strike him as the card-playing type. Unless the diamond is some double entendre, a baseball diamond instead of a felt table. What would that mean?

“Stevie, take off those pants!” Mona splashes to make her point, spraying an arc of water over the lip of the pool, to where Trey, Corey, and Stephen sit in a semicircle of lounge chairs. They are smoking cigars, hardly talking. Actually, just Trey and Stephen smoke; Corey has declined and continues to smack on a large wad of gum. That won’t do, Stephen thinks, but it’s better than chewing tobacco—he’s known enough players who’ve had the cancer cut out of their jaws with a demented jigsaw.

The pool’s splatter gets Stephen’s loafers wet. “Mona, dear, you’ve given away all my trunks.”

“Pish-posh. You too old to skinny-dip?”

“Yes, I believe I am.”

She treads water for a few moments, lets her mouth dip below the waterline before kicking herself back up with a humph. “Trey, how about you?” Trey is quick to shake his head; thank you, but no. “Or your new friend?”

The boy looks startled, as if he’d rather be mistaken for patio furniture, but she is bobbing and sputtering, waiting for an answer.

“Corey. His name is Corey, Mona,” Stephen says.

“Right. Corey. You know how to swim?” She dips down and pops back up, blinking at him. Her mascara has smeared an inch down her cheeks.

“Jesus, Mona,” Stephen says. “That sounds racist.” He’s been correcting her for decades, though her bullheaded comments are less frequent now (their daughter, after all). Usually alcohol is involved, and it’s almost always sparked by ignorance. “Asking a black man if he knows how to swim.”

“What? It’s a simple question. Maybe he doesn’t.”