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Before I could switch off the engine, Zach’s daughter Emma was tugging at the door.

“Wait’ll you try it!” she cried. Her hair was wet and so were her brown T-shirt and red shorts. “We just put the last nail in about an hour ago. You should’ve got here sooner. You could’ve been first off. This is so cool!”

Yeah!

Her excited voice took me back to when one of the promoters for a community pool tried to sign Seth and Minnie up for membership half my lifetime ago.

“It’s going to be Olympic size with a wading pool for the little ones and water slides and high boards for the teenagers,” the neighbor said. Being a brand-new teenager myself then, I was ready to run right home and beg Mother and Daddy to sign up as charter members, too.

No more yucky pond bottoms? No more skinned knees on those sharp creek rocks? No beating the banks and water first in case there were water moccasins around? No more squatting behind chigger-laden bushes if nature called?

Hot damn! Civilization was coming to Cotton Grove for sure.

Seth had looked around at the eager faces of his children and even though cash money was tight in those days, he was ready to pledge his financial support when the neighbor lowered his voice and added, “ ’Course it’ll be—you know—restricted?”

I’m told it’s still restricted, but I don’t have firsthand knowledge since none of us ever joined and no Knott ever swam there.

Uncle Ash and Aunt Zell have an in-ground lap pool for his heart and Robert and Doris have one of those big blue plastic prefab things out back of their house for their grandchildren, but unless we’re at the coast, the rest of us have pretty much made do with Possum Creek.

This was going to be a lot more convenient and I wondered why some of my brothers hadn’t done it a long time ago. Was it because the spring-fed ponds had been dredged for utilitarian reasons? For irrigation and fishing, not for swimming?

I walked out on the solid planking and admired everything the kids had done. As I stood on the very end, Herman’s son Reese came up dripping from the water at my feet and grabbed my ankle. My ball cap flew off and I felt myself falling through the sunlit air to land with a huge splash in deep cool water.

Even with all my clothes on, it felt wonderful, although when I got my hands on Reese, I tried to sit on his head for catching me off guard like that.

Stevie, home on summer vacation from Carolina, was standing on the pier laughing his head off when Seth’s Jessica gave him a mighty shove from behind.

Soon the water was swarming with fully clothed whooping and hollering kids, all from here in the neighborhood. Oh well, I thought. Kids—even farm kids—have so many sophisticated distractions these days. Maybe the pier’s homespun novelty would wear off before my house was finished and this privacy thing became an issue. I missed A.K. and his sister, though. Normally they would be here with the rest.

When I was thoroughly cool, I climbed out and sat on the pier to squeeze water from my shirt and shorts.

“Hey, you know what?” said Emma, treading water in front of me. “For Deborah’s housewarming gift, we ought to take up a collection and buy her a beach.”

“A beach?” asked Stevie, who was floating nearby.

“Yeah. A dump truck full of sand. How much could it cost?”

“Do you know how many truckloads it’d take to make even a ten-foot-wide beach?” said her brother Lee. “It’d cost a pure fortune.”

“And your only paternal aunt’s not worth a fortune?” I cooed sweetly.

They all hooted and I had to scuttle down the planked pier toward land to keep from getting splashed again.

✡      ✡      ✡

My sneakers squished with every step as I walked up to the house still dripping water. My ball cap was the only thing that had escaped a soaking.

Delight welled up in me as I viewed my new house. Pride of ownership, too. From the outside, it was starting to look like a proper dwelling now that the roof was on and most of the siding was up. The south windows had been set since I was last out, which meant that Sheetrocking couldn’t be too far behind.

I had stopped at a store on the way out and filled a cooler with soft drinks and as I pulled it out of the trunk of my car, Will appeared at my elbow.

“Let me help you with that, little sister,” he said, grabbing the other end.

Seth had offered to oversee the construction and Haywood was all set to get his feelings hurt if I didn’t choose him even though both brothers were knee-deep in tobacco when the bank finished approving my loan and I was ready to break ground. Fortunately, summer is the slowest season in Will’s auctioneering business and for some reason, he really wanted to do this for me. Since Will actually worked in construction for a couple of years after he left the farm, I agreed.

Will’s my mother’s oldest child, good-looking and a bit of a rounder. You can’t always count on him to finish what he starts, but when he does work, he works smart. Sometimes the other boys feel a little jealous and say I’m more partial to Seth, so it helps when I can favor one of them over Seth.

We carried the cooler onto what would be a screened porch overlooking the pond and the others inside took a break and came out to join us for a cold drink and something from the snack bag I’d also brought.

They were a pickup crew from here in the neighborhood—two white men, a Mexican, and a black man who was the only one who’d actually worked with steel framing before. According to Will, they’d each grumbled about it though. He hadn’t been all that thrilled at working with the stuff himself. Yeah, yeah, he knew it was the wave of the future, termite proof, cheaper, more energy efficient, et cetera, et cetera.

“All the same, wood’s more forgiving,” he said every time the metal frames popped their bolts or threatened to wobble out from under the men.

Now that everything was braced six ways to Sunday, the house felt as sturdy to him as Adam’s literature had promised.

“It might actually stand up in an earthquake,” he teased me.

Earthquakes aren’t a real big problem in North Carolina. I was more interested in hearing that the house could withstand the wind force of a hurricane and the jaws of industrial-strength termites.

As the men finished their break, Herman’s Annie Sue came out on the porch. She wore a sleeveless yellow tee, cutoffs, and heavy leather work shoes with bright yellow socks. Her chestnut hair was tied back in a ponytail.

“I’m all caught up with you, Uncle Will,” she said, unbuckling the tool belt from her sturdy waist. “Nothing more I can do till the Sheetrock’s up. Hey, Deborah. One of those drinks got my name on it?”

“And a Nab,” I said, holding out the bag.

She broke open the cellophane wrapper and bit into the cheddar crackers smeared with peanut butter. Orange crumbs showered down the front of her shirt.

Herman started teaching Reese about electricity before Annie Sue was born, but she’s a better electrician than he’ll ever be.

Will went back inside and the two of us sat there on the porch steps sipping our Diet Pepsis as we looked out over the long pond where her cousins and older brother still frolicked in the water at the end of the pier.

“Come on in,” they cried, but we both shook our heads even though I was still damp from the water and Annie Sue was equally damp from her hot sweaty work.

Reese’s truck radio was set on a golden oldies country station and scraps of tinny banjo and guitar music floated up to us. The sun baked us dry as it started its long slow slide down the western sky. A male bluebird swooped down on a grasshopper and flew off toward the woods. A field of shoulder-high corn rippled greenly at the edge of my new boundaries. Music, laughter and splashing on one side, the sound of hammers on the other, yet I could feel peacefulness sinking into my bones.