The third column was the hardest to total, and I did not force it into numbers. It was the column for neighborliness: the invitations I had once given freely, the weekends I had once enjoyed sharing the pool, the ease of living next to someone I could wave to without calculating what the wave might be taken to mean. That ease was gone, and I recorded its absence honestly. I had not lost a friendship, exactly, because Sandra and I had never been close friends. I had lost the simpler thing that precedes friendship between neighbors: the assumption that a kindness would be received as a kindness and returned in kind. That assumption had been spent, a little at a time, over six years, and it could not be re-entered as a credit.
I did not write this accounting with self-pity, and I checked myself for it as I went. Self-pity would have rounded the losses upward and left the gains unrecorded. There were gains, and I recorded them too. I had learned the exact terms on which I would offer anything again, and I had learned them before the loss became larger than a pool. I had a file that would answer any future question about ownership without my having to raise my voice. I had a gate code known to two people. I had a winter in which the yard was quiet and the house was mine in a way it had not felt mine during the summer. These were not consolations invented to soften the totals. They were entries, and they belonged on the page.
When I finished, I read the three columns back and closed the notebook. The year had cost money, time, and an easy neighborliness. It had not cost the pool, the house, or my name on any document that mattered. The balance was not favorable, and I did not pretend otherwise. But it balanced. The debits were real, the credits were real, and neither side required exaggeration to be understood. I filed the notebook with the binder, not inside it but beside it, and I went to make dinner. Winter accounting, done honestly, does not ask for sympathy. It asks only that the numbers be allowed to stand as written, until spring gives them something new to record.
In March, the light changed first, before the weather did. It came back over the fence a little earlier each evening, and it fell on the covered pool with a quality I recognized from other springs: a practical light, fit for inspecting work. I telephoned Aqua Design Solutions in the second week of the month and asked to confirm the spring schedule. Tom Alvarez answered, and he remembered the house, the pool, and the September quote without my having to remind him of any of it. The replastering and the pump replacement were still priced as quoted, he said, and the crew could begin in April, weather permitting. I confirmed the dates, and I wrote them in my diary in ink.
The decision to refill was not a dramatic one, and I did not treat it as such. I had drained the pool for two reasons, and both reasons had been satisfied: the replastering was now scheduled, and the safety question had been answered by a locked gate and a changed code. There was no further reason to keep the pool empty, and keeping it empty out of caution alone would have turned a maintenance decision into a monument. I am not in the habit of building monuments. I signed the work order, filed my copy with the September quote, and paid the deposit by check. The balance would be due on completion, as before, and I noted both amounts in the house ledger.
The crew arrived on a Tuesday in April, which meant Doug adjusted his visit to the following day without complaint. There were four men, and they worked with the unhurried competence of people who have replastered many pools and do not need to narrate their work. I watched from the kitchen window for the first hour, and then I went out to inspect, because inspecting is what I do and because Tom expected it. The old plaster came off in sections, revealing the concrete shell beneath, gray and sound. The tile border, which had been chipped in places by years of use, was repaired where it needed repair and left where it did not. I asked two questions, both about drainage and curing time, and Tom answered both directly. I wrote his answers down.