The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper Read Free Book Online

The large, marbleized pool that glinted like a kidney-shaped jewel in their sizeable yard was all that mattered. Through eight hours of cutting and pressing hot styrene in the scorching heat, it seemed as if the image of its cool blue waters was permanently tattooed on the insides of my eyelids. But Sammy's pool represented far more than a relief from the summer heat. There were other factors. My house, which had the added distinction of not having a pool, was hardly a desirable destination for me in those days. A gloomy silence had settled over the family in the years since my mother's death, and rather than working our way through it, we seemed to have buckled under its weight, like a house with a latent flaw in its construction. Conversation was rare, laughter an anomaly. At least Brad and my dad could talk basketball, once in a while even step into the driveway for some one-on-one, which gave the illusion of familial ease, but that summer my brother was off on a cross-country trip with some of his college buddies. That left just me to watch my father come home, his expression grim, his massive shoulders stooped from a general exhaustion that went much deeper than a hard day's work. I considered offering to play some one-on-one with him, but never actually did, so sure was I of the sardonic, condescending grin that would alight instantly on his face, the ironically pointed arch of his bushy eyebrows as he looked down to me and said, “You?” It was my sorry fortune to know that my father preferred to sit in the dim, air-conditioned privacy of his den, washing down his TV dinner with Bushmills in the nuclear glow of the television until he passed out, over stepping outside to spend some quality time with the runt of his inconsiderable litter.
    Factory hours were seven to three, and with Wayne working at Porter's until after six every evening, my afternoons stretched out before me with a bleakly comprehensive lack of options. A girlfriend would have come in pretty handy in those days, but in three years of high school I'd proven to be remarkably inept in that arena, and sadly not for lack of trying. The closest I'd come to sex up until that point was the night of my eighth-grade graduation, when Morgan Hayes had let me feel her up under the shirt over the bra while she shredded my lips with her braces.
    So it was a lonely, motherless, bored, and sexually frustrated teenager who accepted Sammy's invitation to submerge himself daily in the cool waters of the Haber swimming pool. And it was that same boy who discovered, much to his hormonal glee, that Lucy Haber, Sammy's long-limbed, ridiculously sexy mother, spent her afternoons alternately swimming laps and sunning herself in various two-piece swimsuits whose every fiber strained to contain her glorious assets.
    Sammy wasn't much of a swimmer. He went through the motions briefly, as if to justify his inviting me over to swim, but he would always climb out after five or ten minutes, pull a towel over his skinny torso, and retreat to the air-conditioned house, where he would reconfigure the soaked strands of his pompadour and read music magazines. After the first few days of this, we settled into a comfortable routine wherein Sammy hung out in the house reading and I stayed in the pool, nursing a shameless submarine erection as I chatted with his mother. Lucy, so unlike any mother I'd ever met, seemed to enjoy having someone to spend the afternoon with, and quizzed me incessantly about my own life, occasionally digressing into stories about hers. As far as I was concerned, she could have been discussing quantum physics and I would have been equally transfixed, so caught up was I in the constant inspection of her lush lips, her trim, tanned thighs, and the droplets of water that trickled down her glistening chest and into the crevice of her miraculous cleavage as she sunned herself beside the pool. Her husband's repeated infidelities now seemed not only wrong but baffling