Below the counter Mona finds the inside of her husband’s thigh, her fingers exploring the surface of his chinos in a way that makes Stephen squirm. Suddenly, her hand pauses and her face lights up. “Who wants to go swimming?”

In the time it takes the women to assemble on the patio Stephen has had another two fingers of Scotch and convinced himself Mona’s forgotten the whole idea and instead gone back to sucking on olives and squeaking in the kitchen. But then his wife announces herself in the doorway, howling like a banshee. She’s donned a short robe, most of the length of her legs at the mercy of the tiki torches’ light. She leads the conga line of barefoot women, some of them wrapped in towels, others in sarongs, in a strut across the patio, waving arms and kicking legs. The colors and prints look vaguely familiar to Stephen, swimsuits and cruise wear and poolside cover-ups he has bought his wife over the years.

“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?