The Deep End Read Free Page A

the phone calls started before or after Paul left.”)
    Joanne is wondering the same thing, trying very hard to assign some order to the events of the last several months. But like a child caught up with the eternal riddle of the chicken and the egg, she is unable to determine exactly what came before what.
    She knows only that in the last several months, everything in her life has been turned upside down, that she is hanging by her heels from the ceiling, watching as familiar objects fall away from her, seeing them suddenly distorted and strange. There is nothing for her to grab onto, no arms to pull her to safety. Things have a way of working out, she hears Lulu repeating, purposely using the very phrase Joanne has used so often in the past, the same words she remembers her own mother repeating to her.
    Joanne pulls herself to her feet, aware that the phone has stopped ringing. She walks around to the shallow end of the aborted swimming pool, and climbs down the three steps into the empty pit. Maybe I am crazy, she thinks, deciding that this is probably the easiest solution to her problems.
    Joanne Hunter watches the world recede as she progresses farther into the deep end of the empty concrete hole. She pushes her back against the rough cement at the corner from which the boomerang veers, and slowly slides down along its harsh surface to the bottom. Sittingwith her knees drawn up against her chest, she hears the phone on her kitchen wall once again begin its persistent ring. It’s just you and me now, he is telling her. Joanne nods her head in silent acknowledgement of the unstated fact and tries to conjure up images of happier times.

TWO
    A s Joanne recalls, the phone had been ringing just before Eve arrived at her front door almost two months earlier. “Hello?” Joanne said into the receiver, more a question than a statement. “Hello. Hello?” She shrugged her shoulders and replaced the receiver. “Kids,” she pronounced, still shaking her head with dismay as she ushered Eve inside several minutes later.
    “You ready?” Eve asked.
    “I just have to find my racquet.” Joanne opened the closet in the front hall. “I think I buried it back here somewhere.”
    “Well, hurry up and find it. I understand that the new pro is quite delicious, and I wouldn’t want to miss a minute of our lesson.”
    “I don’t know why I let you talk me into these things.”
    “Because you’ve always let me talk you into everything. It’s part of your charm.”
    Joanne stopped searching for a minute, squatting under the family’s assorted spring coats, and turned to face her friend of almost thirty years. “Do you remember what my mother always used to say?” Eve’s quizzicalexpression indicated that she didn’t. “She used to ask me, ‘If Eve told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it?’”
    Eve laughed. “At least she didn’t call all your friends at two o’clock in the morning to find out where you were, or come downstairs to ‘fix the plumbing’ when you were entertaining a boy in the rec room.”
    “I never entertained boys in the rec room,” Joanne reminded her, resuming her search.
    “Yes, I know. You were always so disgustingly pure.” She looked toward the kitchen. “The pool seems to be coming along great guns. I keep tabs from my bedroom window.”
    “Well, the man said ten days to two weeks, tops, so it looks like they may finish on schedule. Found it,” she said, triumphantly retrieving her racquet from the back of the closet. “I’ll just tell the men I’m leaving.”
    “Hurry, we’ll be late.”
    “You’re always in such a hurry,” Joanne laughed as she ran back into the kitchen and opened the sliding door to inform the workers she would be gone for several hours.
    “And you’re always so slow,” Eve countered after Joanne returned. “It takes a stick of dynamite to get you moving.”
    “That’s why we’ve been friends for so long. If we were both like me, we’d