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purple fridge. She had given me careful instructions on what to wear and where to go before nearly pushing me out the back door. She hadn’t offered to come, but I would have denied her that, anyway.
    The city pool was a few blocks off Main Street, and as the day was sweltering, the pool was very crowded. I hesitated outside the tall, black, iron fence, seeing what exactly I had to contend with.
    It was a giant L-shaped pool with a diving board on one end and several kiddie pools around it. There was a big, twisting water slide on one side, and mothers in lounge chairs lined the fence. Kids ran everywhere and … there they were.
    A teenage girl, probably a year younger than me, was standing near a group of chattering kids. She bit her nails and looked bored, glancing at the clock every now and again. Parents showed up in a steady stream, taking towels and shoes from their kids before retreating to the outer ring of spectators. I was the oldest “kid” by about ten years.
    It would have been easy to say I was too embarrassed to go. But that wasn’t it. The truth was that I was downright scared. My stomach had taken up a permanent position near my shoes and the thought of getting into the pool made my skin cold.
    I would have been a nervous mess , I told myself, as I stared between the rectangles in the fence.
    Would have been. Well that settled it. I had already decided that I wasn’t going.
    I watched as the teenage girl blew her whistle and tried to get the kids to stop talking before shepherding them toward the shallow end of the pool. It was a scene too familiar for comfort.
    The pool in St. Louis where Joan had taken me was eerily similar. Or maybe my memory was playing tricks on me. I had been fairly young, but I knew it was a big, crowded city pool with a flippant, disinterested teenager showing us how to hold our noses underwater. There was a boy named Rufus with red hair who I had a crush on.
    It’s the strangest things that a kid’s memory holds onto.
    That day so long ago, the first day of what was supposed to be a six-week course, I had been spectacular, or so Joan told me on the way home. We hadn’t done any actual swimming, just holding our breath under water and pool safety. Pool safety. As if that was a point that I, at eight years old, needed to have hammered home one more time.
    It wasn’t that pool safety had ever been discussed in our house. Rather, it had not been discussed. Passionately not discussed for eighteen years. Because that was the way my mother dealt with tragedy. Or anything in life, really. If you didn’t talk about it, it certainly had not happened.
    So that day Joan took me to swimming lessons had been the first of its kind in my entire life. But when we arrived back at the house that afternoon, my hair stringy and wet, my mother’s car was in the driveway. I didn’t need to see Joan’s flustered face to know that this was not going according to plan.
    And when we went inside, I remember my mother unleashing a fury like I had never seen her possess before. Fury like I didn’t think she had in her. She took in my wet, tousled hair and the big fluffy towel wrapped around my swimming suit. She descended on Joan like a vengeful lioness.
    I was sent to my room then, but I was old enough to know that Joan had broken the rules. Caroline Manchester’s child did not swim.
    Not until this stupid summer at the Pink Palace.
    The Pink Palace, some kind of shining beacon to my mother. She had been oddly emotional throughout my entire senior year of high school. And her solution to this premature separation anxiety was apparently to haul us out here to break the morbid fear of water that had been festering in our family since before I was born. The thing was, she wasn’t all that good at facing up to things. And that’s how I found myself standing alone at a public pool, abruptly facing a fear I’d never had to face before—a fear that I’d been encouraged not to face for as long as I