"The two boys wanted in the pool. The pool sat at the center of the apartment complex, not in a nice part of the town. The town itself was in a not nice part of the state, and no one vacationed to that part of the country anyway. The town had more prisons than restaurants.
The two boys, brothers, thirty-two months apart, lived in the complex with their mother—single in the sense that she was romantically alone. The spring wasn't record hot, but school was out and the mother couldn't make the A/C payment. At night the boys blanketed themselves down on the floor next to a giant fan, as much for the noise as the cool. The mother, who sometimes worked the graveyard shift, would some nights punch out and come home to spy her boys sleeping close like sister cats.
The mother got home at four but woke up at seven to fix the boys frozen French toast sticks. The boys asked if today wouldn't be a good day to break in their new used trunks.
"Maybe," the mother said, "but only if the temperature climbs to seventy-two." The mother did not tell the boys that the weather woman's forecast set the high at 68 and that she, the mother, really didn't feel like watching out for drowning kids on her one damn day off."
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