AllFreeNovel
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I’m superfluous out here, of course. We have enough hired men and women to take care of everything, but still… Nothing takes the edge off like good old hard work—another lesson from the man who fathered me. The man I’m avoiding.
After six hours of hauling grain and tending to animals, I’m still tense, so I take off early in the afternoon. I shower, and then I walk the pathway between my guesthouse and my parents’ home. I head to the pool house, change into my trunks, and then execute a perfect dive into my father’s lap pool. He’s not home, of course. He’s at work, conversing with Uncle Bryce about God knows what.
Probably more secrets he can keep from the rest of us.
I cut through the water like a great white, my strokes in perfect form.
I swim and I swim and I swim. I lose count of how many laps I’ve done, and I keep going, keep going, keep going…
Until—
“Brock!”
My mother. My mother’s voice.
I come to the edge of the pool and bring my head out of the water. “Yeah? What is it, Mom?”
“What are you doing here?” She sits down at one of the tables by the pool, wearing a fleece jacket and jeans.
It’s an early November day, a little brisk at around fifty-five degrees. But my parents’ pool is heated, and I feel fine.
Mom rises, walks into the pool house, and returns with a large towel. She hands it to me. “This is heated. Wrap it around yourself. Then go change and come talk to me.”
My mother is a professional talker.
She’s a medical doctor—a psychiatrist who specializes in childhood trauma.
I didn’t have any childhood trauma.
I had an idyllic childhood, unlike my cousins Dale and Donny.
I take the towel, go back to the pool house, and change back into my clothes.
When I return, Mom has lit the gas-powered fire pit.
“Sit,” she says. “Patrice is bringing some water. I want you to drink up.”
That’s Mom, always taking care of everyone. She knows how dehydrated I get when I go crazy swimming laps like that.
“You’re a dead ringer for your father right now, Brock,” she says. “So many times I’d find him out here, swimming until his muscles could no longer move. But you can’t swim your troubles away, son.”
“I can sure as hell try.”
Mom smiles, and Patrice walks over with the waters.
“Thank you, Patrice,” Mom says. Then to me, “Drink up.”
I down an entire glass of water flavored with lemon, and then Mom pours me another, nodding.
“This one too.”
“Making my bladder burst isn’t going to help anything,” I say.
“Two of these glasses is twenty-four ounces altogether, so nothing is going to burst your bladder, Brock. Trust me. I’m a doctor.”
“A head doctor.”
“I went to medical school, and I did all my rotations. I know basic anatomy, and I know how the bladder works. So do you, for that matter, so stop arguing with me.”
