Chapter 14

14

B ernadine used her key to open the aquatic center. She had been coming to water aerobics for over three years. She usually beat the teacher, Ellen O'Riley, and eventually the aquatic center had just given her a key.

That might not be the way normal towns did things, but Sweet Water was a little different. Even though they had an Olympic-caliber training center right in town. Or right outside of town, as the case was.

Regardless, Bernadine ignored the ache in her back and pushed her glasses further up her nose. Her hands were too shaky for her to get her contacts in anymore, and she'd taken to wearing her glasses everywhere. She lost her husband fourteen years before and had celebrated her seventy-fourth birthday just a couple of weeks ago.

She was pretty spry for her age, but she had what the doctors called an essential tremor. They assured her it wasn't Parkinson's, but whatever it was, it made her life a lot more difficult.

She wished she would have appreciated her youth while she had it, because old age stunk. It was hard, and…ever since she'd lost her husband, she wished she had someone to share it with. Surely getting old would be easier if there were two of them to face it together.

But getting married at her age seemed…maybe foolish. It wouldn't be what she wanted, which was a lifetime spent with someone, someone who knew her inside out, could finish her sentences, had seen her at her worst—which would have been childbirth for her or maybe the day her husband had his heart attack. Whichever. Still, someone who had seen her at her worst, knew her foibles and admired her strengths, and covered her weaknesses.

Anyone she met now at her age, they would only have a decade together, or maybe two if they were very blessed. Not long enough at all to know someone the way she'd known her husband.

Still, staying home and crying over spilled milk wasn't going to do her any good either. So, a few years ago, she'd lugged her body off the couch, even though she didn't want to, and had set off to try to find some friends and do something productive with her life.

That's when the aquatic ladies had been born.

She dragged her housemate, rode along with her, and there were a bunch of older and getting older ladies who got their old, creaking bones out of bed before the crack of dawn and came to take a dip in the pool.

Ellen had been faithful in teaching them, and the few times that she had missed, Bernadine had taken over.

Maybe she'd try to start her own aerobics class. She surely ought to be able to do it by now. Being that she was a three-year veteran.

She was in the ladies' locker room starting to change, she had her swimsuit out of her bag, when Ellen walked in, bleary-eyed, looking like she hadn't slept a wink, and making Bernadine think for the first time that maybe the rumors that had been going around about her were true.

"Doesn't look like you slept at all last night," Bernadine said, wondering if she could just come out and ask. She knew older ladies sometimes could get away with things that younger ladies couldn't, but she liked and respected Ellen, and didn't want to spread her secret around town if what she heard last night was actually true.

"Actually, I didn't," Ellen said, looking around the locker room like she'd never seen it before.

"Were you up with the baby?" Bernadine asked, knowing she probably shouldn't have.

Ellen stopped, and the unfocused look in her gaze left immediately and she zeroed in on Bernadine. "How did you know that?" There was wonder in her voice, and total shock.

"That's the rumor that was going around last night. That you'd had a baby, and that you gave it to Travis to raise. That was the reason that he came back from Brazil."

"What about me? Do I get to raise it too?"

"Well, are you?" Bernadine asked, holding her swimsuit in one hand and staring at Ellen. Why in the world would Ellen be asking her?

"I don't know. I… Travis does have a baby, but it's not mine. Not really."

"Well, last time I checked, it took two to create a baby. Of course, with all these newfangled inventions they seem to come out with on a daily basis, maybe there's a way for your phone to pop out a baby that only has a dad and not a mom. Is there?"

Bernadine didn't really think there was, but she never thought that she'd actually be pushing buttons on the screen of a phone and have it do what she told it to do. That was pretty much what her phone did, except when it decided to get cantankerous and not obey her. Or, like her friend said, it was operator error.

Bernadine hated it when it was operator error. After teaching school for forty years, she didn't think she had any operator error left in her, but apparently, she was mistaken.

Ellen shook her head. "No. I did not have a baby." She looked around once more, like she wasn't quite sure where she was again. Which made Bernadine very suspicious. So far, Ellen had been just as good as an adult as she had been in the classroom, but sometimes adults went off the deep end.

"Where's your swimming suit? And your bag?" she asked, narrowing her eyes at Ellen. If there were drugs in her life, Bernadine was going to turn her in. Although, maybe she should have her friends stage an intervention first. Was that what they called it nowadays?

Back in her school days, she'd send the kid to the principal and let him handle it. Not that they ever did, they just sent the kid back to the classroom where they did the exact same thing all over again. Bernadine had finally figured out that if she wanted a problem to be solved, she had to do it herself. A lot of times, the kids who acted up didn't have a good homelife, and she ended up organizing after-school classes for them.

The ones who attended always did better.

But sometimes you just couldn't help people who didn't want to be helped.

"You know what, I totally forgot it!" Ellen said, smacking her forehead and laughing. "I was up all night with the baby."

"The one that's not yours, but Travis's?"

"Yeah. Alice. Her name's Alice, and she is the sweetest little thing."

"Who's the mom?"

"Um. I don't know. I'm not sure he knows her name." Ellen closed her mouth. She looked both ways, maybe to see if any of the other ladies had arrived, and then she lowered her voice to a whisper. "I'm not sure what he's going to say about her. But… Please don't tell anyone. Okay?"

"Tell anyone what? Everybody knows you guys have a baby now."

"That's right. We have a baby."

Ellen gritted her jaw and grimaced, like she hadn't meant to say that, and Bernadine understood, even if she wasn't sure exactly what Ellen was saying, that whatever was going on with the baby wasn't something that they wanted everyone in the town to know.

"Well, you're probably going to need to get it together a little better if you don't want anyone else to be suspicious. I can keep from saying anything, but the ladies who are showing up today have mouths that run like faucets."

"I know." Ellen sighed.

Bernadine felt bad for the girl. She and her husband had never had any children. Maybe that was part of the reason that she felt so alone in her old age. All these choices which seemed like such good choices at the time came back to bite a person as they got older. She had been young and carefree once. She had all of her summers free, and she and her husband had traveled a lot. But now that he was gone, and she was too old to do the things that she used to do, she didn't really have anyone.

So she had to make her own family. It had taken her a while to figure that out though.

Still, Sweet Water was home and felt like family to her, and if Ellen needed her protection, she would give it.

"If you want to go home, I'll teach the class for you today. I can just tell people that you're under the weather, and you can figure out what you want to tell them eventually, but I suggest you not go out and about until you're ready to answer some questions."

"I'm sorry. I really hate to leave you in the lurch, but I can hardly teach without my swimming suit. And…" Ellen looked at her with tired eyes but a grateful smile. "Thanks for the advice. I… I don't want anyone to get hurt."

That seemed like an odd thing to say, but Bernadine nodded, like she understood when she really didn't, and watched as Ellen looked around the locker room again, and then slowly made her way to the door.

"Do you need someone to drive you home?" she asked, usually believing that a person did best if they were made to be responsible, but in this case, Ellen looked so tired Bernadine was actually concerned that she might not make it.

"No. Thank you. I'm fine," Ellen said and walked slowly out the door, greeting Rhoda and Agathe as they walked in, confused when Ellen walked by them, fully dressed, and turned and went toward the outside door.

"She's leaving? Is class cancelled?" Rhoda said as she walked in, her bag slung over her shoulder. Rhoda was younger than many of the other ladies in the group, since she wasn't even to retirement age. She was only sixty years old, but her husband had been some highfalutin surgeon, and after he had died of a heart attack, Rhoda had taken his life insurance and retired comfortably.

She was a sweet lady and one of Bernadine's favorite people. Her two sons were both doctors, and her daughter had become a lawyer. All of them were busy and didn't spend much time with their mother.

Agathe, on the other hand, had moved from France to marry the American with whom she'd fallen in love with on vacation. She had been living in the United States for more than forty years. Her husband had not passed away but was slowly succumbing to Alzheimer's.

"What's going on?" Agathe said in her lilting voice that still held a trace of her French accent.

"Ellen wasn't quite up to snuff, so I'll be teaching the class today," Bernadine said, her voice brokering no nonsense. She hadn't learned to control classrooms of thirty thirteen-year-olds by being weak-willed and lily-livered.

"Oh. Well, that's nice," Agathe said, the sadness that never quite left her eyes fading for a bit as they brightened. "I love it when you teach. You do such a good job. Although, I love Ellen as well. Such a sweet girl. About the age I was when I left France." Her voice grew a little wistful.

Bernadine didn't have too much time for dreams and that type of thing, but she knew that Agathe missed her homeland and longed to go back to visit.

She couldn't, however, leave her husband in his condition while she flew all over the globe, not only because it wouldn't look good, but because Agathe was as loyal as a French bulldog and wouldn't dream of leaving the love of her life behind.

It had to be terrible watching him fade away slowly, day by day. It made Bernadine appreciate the fact that her husband had gone quickly. Although it had been a shock and very difficult to get over, she couldn't imagine watching him as he slowly became someone different than the man she fell in love with. When he looked at her and didn't recognize her, when he didn't know the people that they knew, and when carrying on a conversation was impossible. All things that Agathe was almost sure to go through with her husband.

"You know, I heard yesterday that Ellen gave her baby to Travis to raise. I didn't even know she was pregnant," Rhoda said as she struggled into her swimsuit and folded her clothes neatly into a pile.

"Ellen was pregnant?" Agathe said, sounding just as shocked as Bernadine had been.

"You know, with some women, you just can't tell."

"Ladies. We are not going to gossip about Ellen. Ellen has been very good to us, she's never late, she shows up every morning, and she does her very best. Where would we be without her?"

The other two ladies looked at her, thinking about what she said. She knew she was right. Who else wanted to teach a bunch of over-the-hill women water aerobics at five o'clock in the morning?

No one. That's who.

Ellen was one of a kind.

"I think we ought to do something nice for her," Bernadine stated, used to commanding classrooms, except…she had this thought, but she had no idea of what something nice might be.

"What do you suggest?" Rhoda said, willing to go along.

"I don't know. I'm going to need to think about that." She looked at the two of them. "Unless you two have ideas?"

"She loves her dog," Agathe said.

"True that. She also loves her cows. Shaggy, monstrous-looking beasts."

The talk drifted to other things as the other ladies in the class came in, and Bernadine simply announced that she was the teacher that day.

She quashed any hint of anyone trying to mention Ellen and a baby, although it was rather hard. Especially since she didn't know exactly what was going on.

She wished she did, but she wasn't sure who to go to. Regardless, once they got in the water, things eased up and they focused on the various exercises that Ellen always led them through. She did vary them from time to time, and Bernadine simply did a class based on their favorites.

By the time the class was over, she decided that she was going to gather everyone together and discuss it.

At five 'til six, she announced the class was over, but then she said, "If those of you who wouldn't mind listening to an idea I have would stay after class, I'd appreciate it."

"Can we stay in the pool?" Rhoda asked.

"Sure." Bernadine looked around. Typically when they left their class between six fifteen and six thirty, the building was still deserted. Every once in a while, a few athletes who were in training would be showing up about that time, but normally they had things to themselves.

The ladies arranged themselves in a group, some of them moving around in the water and others just swishing their arms back and forth.

There was something very relaxing about water, and she was glad that she had stepped out of her comfort zone and put on a swimming suit for the first time in thirty years; she hadn't regretted it.

Whether or not it made her healthier, as the doctor said it would, she wasn't sure.

"All right, ladies, I've been thinking about something. Periodically in our town, there are people who need help. Now, it's a small town, and everyone's always willing to lend a hand, but the eight of us have been together for years, always coming to class and doing our exercises and leaving. What do you say, instead of just coming to class and doing water aerobics, we could…form a group?"

"What kind of group?" Agathe asked, and if she suspected this had anything to do with Ellen, she didn't say.

Agathe would actually be one of the people that Bernadine thought would need help.

After all, she was going through a hard time, and she shouldn't have to go through it by herself.

"The kind of group who helps people," Bernadine said, and she wanted it to be that simple.

"So we swim, and we…help people?"

"That's exactly right. Now, we need a really cool name." She said "cool," just like the kids did. She figured that probably that word was out of date, like all the other words that had come and gone throughout her lifetime. She was too old to care and definitely didn't need to keep up with them. Back when she was in school, she just had to keep up on the swear words so she could know when a kid needed detention. Beyond that, she couldn't be bothered.

"Does anybody have any ideas?"

"You kind of sprung this on us," Asenath said. "Can't we have a little bit of time to think? Like, until our next class?"

They met three days a week. She supposed she could give them two days to think about a name.

"All right. That is reasonable. We'll take two days to think of a name, and then we'll come back on Wednesday, and we'll decide on a name."

"Who are we going to help? And what are we going to do?"

"Well, I don't know. I just think we should help people. Whether that means giving them things, or staying with them, or?—"

"Matching them up with someone. People who are lonely could find their soulmate in us." Opal looked like she was very proud of herself for coming up with that.

"I don't know if we want to get into that. That's…complicated."

"I think we should vote on it. Isn't that what groups do?" Kitten said slyly.

"All right. We'll vote on it on Wednesday. And we'll vote on a name. Come with your favorite."

She didn't know whether they'd end up helping Ellen or not, but Ellen had given them a reason to band together. And for that, Bernadine was thankful.