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She rested on the long, white towel she had draped over the painted wooden bench under a sky so bright that the white clouds seemed lit from within. There was music playing over the club’s PA system, old R&B, Al Green. There were only a few others at the pool on this morning in early June. School was not yet dismissed for the summer and so only a few very young children were there, laughing and splashing below, their mothers in sunglasses and terry-cloth, skimming magazines on the benches.
This would be the last year for the club. By next June, the whole complex – the clubhouse, the playground, the pool itself would all have been razed and the dirt raked over them neatly and planted. That was sad, she thought. But she would be gone by then, on to a new place, a bigger city in the south, where things were growing, not collapsing.
Copyright 2016
Let’s Stay Together was the song playing, by the way.
Of course. . .