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I sat in my daughter's driveway on Easter Sunday and watched my 6 year old granddaughter cannonball into the pool through the open side gate. She thought I was inside helping her mother with the potato salad. I had been in that driveway 22 minutes. She came up out of the water and looked at the kitchen window and waved at it. She was wearing a swimsuit with a mermaid on the front and a ruffle round the middle. Her name is Josie. She has my husband's ears and my daughter's freckles and a laugh you can hear from the end of the street. I had the engine running and the air on and a Tupperware of deviled eggs going soft on the passenger seat. I had a swimsuit in a bag on the floor. The new one. Nikki had picked it out for me at Dillard's 3 weeks before, black, with a bit of gathering at the waist. I cried in that fitting room and she thought it was the mirror. It wasn't. I was standing there in a swimsuit I already knew I was not going to wear. I'd promised Josie I would swim with her. She'd been telling people for 2 weeks. Grandma's getting in. Grandma's going on the floatie. Grandma's diving for the pennies they throw in the deep end. I sat in that driveway and I could not make my hand open the door. I'm 61 years old. My name is Suzanne. I've lived in Mesa, Arizona for 29 years. I've worked in the front office at an elementary school on the east side for 21 of them. I run the drop-off line. I bandage knees. I know every kindergartner's allergy and most of their mothers' first names. I am, in my regular life, a capable woman. I am not a woman who sits in driveways. But I have to tell you how I got there before I can tell you how I got out. It started the July before last. Nikki had put the pool in the summer Josie turned 3, and that first year I was in it every weekend. I have the pictures. Me in the shallow end with a child on my hip and my hair flat to my head. Then one Saturday in July, Josie was on the step in the shallow end and I got in. And she got out. She didn't say anything. She was 4. She climbed out and sat on the edge with her feet in and waited, politely, the way children wait for a thing to be over. I stayed in for maybe 5 minutes. Then I got out, and I put my cardigan on over a wet swimsuit in 108 degrees, and I did not get in a pool again for 2 years. Here's what I did instead. I took the chair at the far end of the ramada, the one in the shade, and I said it was the shade. I did the dishes inside during parties. Every party. I'd be at that sink with the window over it and the whole family out there in the water, and I'd tell myself somebody had to do it. I started volunteering to drive, so I'd have a reason to leave when I wanted to leave. At the school gate I stopped bending down to the little ones. I'd put a hand up instead and do a wave, and the children thought it was a game we had. And when Josie asked, and for the first year she asked every single time, I said the same thing. Next time, baby. Grandma's not feeling great today. Next time. Next time. Next time. She stopped asking last summer. Nothing happened. No scene, no crying, nobody sat me down. She still ran at me in the driveway, still wanted the same book, still asked for the bedtime song. She'd just moved me. A child works out what the world is by watching it, and she watched me for a year and then she filed it. Grandma sits in the shade. Grandma does the dishes. That's who Grandma is. That's the part I'd take back first. Not the pool. Every next time that taught a 5 year old to quit asking. And here's the thing I could not explain to anybody, including myself, at 2 in the morning. Her grandfather gets in that pool. Dale is 63, he's been on roofs since he was 19, his knees are shot and his back is worse. He goes in the deep end with her on his shoulders and she stays on him for an hour. Same house. Same water. Same child. So it wasn't the pool. And it wasn't her age. And it wasn't my knees, or the sun, or the shade, or any of the 40 reasonable things I had told my own daughter over 2 years. I knew that. I just had nothing to put in its place. Then in March she asked me again. Seven months of not asking, and then one Sunday at her kitchen table she looked up at me and said, Grandma, will you get in the pool with me at Easter. I said yes. I have thought about why I said yes every day since. She told her class. She told her dance teacher. She told the man at the meat counter who knows her by name. Grandma's coming Sunday and we're going swimming. Nikki called me on the Thursday. She said, "Mom. Not this time. Please." I told her I wouldn't do that to her again. I made the eggs. I drove over on Sunday with the cardigan folded on the back seat, the way it had been folded on the back seat for 2 years. And I sat in that driveway for 22 minutes. Nikki came down eventually, in her sundress, and knocked on the window. "Mom. What are you doing." "I'm coming. Give me a minute." She looked at the Dillard's bag on the floor of the car. Then she looked at me. "Are you not coming in." And I started crying the kind of crying where you can't get a breath, in a parked car, on Easter Sunday, at 61 years old. She got in the passenger seat and moved the eggs to the floor and didn't say anything for a while. When I could talk I said, "I can't do it. Not in front of her." She said, "Mom, it's a pool. It's family." I said, "I know." She said, "Then what is it." And I sat there with my hands on the wheel of a parked car and I could not answer my own daughter, because I did not have the answer, and I have never felt more like a stupid old woman in my life. I went inside. I wore the cardigan. I sat in the shade and watched Dale throw pennies in the deep end. At one point Josie came over dripping and put her cold hand on my knee and said, "Grandma, are you not gonna swim." I said, "Next time, baby." She looked at me for a second longer than a 6 year old ought to be able to look at anybody. Then she went back to the water. 2 days after Easter I was out on the drop-off line with the stop sign, waving cars through the way I have every morning for 21 years. A grey SUV came round and the window went down. It was Lorna. She worked the front office with me from 2013 to 2016, before she went up to the district. I hadn't seen her in about 8 years. Before the schools she'd spent 20 years as an aide in a nursing home up in Globe. "Suze," she said. "Look at you." "Lorna, look at you." She asked if I got a break. I said 8:30, 15 minutes. We sat at the picnic table by the staff lot at 8:35 with 2 cups of coffee, and the sun already hot. And I told her all of it. I have not told another human being all of it. I told Dale pieces. I told Nikki the Easter version, which was no version at all. I told Lorna the whole thing, sitting at a picnic table, including the part about Josie getting out of the water and sitting on the step, which I had never once said out loud. Lorna listened all the way to the end. She didn't interrupt me. Then she put her coffee down and reached into her bag and put something on the table between us. Small, wrapped in tissue paper. Persimmon orange. Characters on the front I couldn't read. She didn't say a word about it. "How many times a day are you showering, Suze." I looked at her. "Twice," I said. "Three, if I'm going over there." She nodded like somebody hearing a thing she has heard before. "That's not a fault. It's the wrong tool, is all." "Lorna, she was 4. She got out of the water." "She was 4. Honest, and no words for it yet. Those two things together are brutal." She turned her cup around. "Things change. Your hair goes. Your eyes go. Your skin gets drier." "Nobody's fault. You color it, you get glasses." "Well. It also starts making something it never made before. A compound. It has a smell to it. Not a pleasant one." "I've never heard of that." "Nobody has. People don't talk about it." "Then I'll shower before I go over. I already do that." "That's the part everybody gets wrong." She set her cup down. "Ordinary soap doesn't take it off." "Now you're being ridiculous." "Think about garlic. You chop it, then you wash your hands. Twice, with soap. And?" I didn't answer her. "And?" "They still smell." "They still smell. Your hands are clean and it stayed anyway. Garlic leaves a molecule behind that soap doesn't react with. Still there." She said, "What our skin starts making is called nonenal. Works exactly the same way." I sat there with that. A child in a pool. Her face an inch from your neck. Wet, for an hour. Not a hug at the door. Not a book on a lap. An hour, in the heat, with nothing between us. "Then what gets rid of it?" She pushed the little parcel across the table. "I put that on the table 20 minutes ago. I wasn't going to push it across until you asked." "It's soap. Made from persimmon. It doesn't cover it. The tannins take it apart." "And it works?" "I sent half that place home with one. I've used it for years." She turned her cup around again. "One morning it occurred to me I'd stopped bracing every time somebody hugged me. I never knew I'd been doing it." Then she said, "It's called Kaori. Order more than one while you can. They make it in small batches and this one's nearly gone. Once a batch sells out you're waiting months." The bell went. I went back inside and put it in my purse and did the attendance. I used it that night. It's a bar of soap. I didn't expect anything. The next morning I stood at the mirror longer than I needed to. Not for any reason. Just standing. The scent was still on my skin. Citrus, but warm. Not the sharp kind. I hadn't stood like that in a long time. Week 2, at the school gate, I bent down to a kindergartner with a loose tooth without thinking about it, the way I used to do 40 times a morning. Week 3, Dale came up behind me while I was doing the dishes and put his chin on my shoulder, which he has not done since I don't know when, and said nothing at all about it. Week 4, Nikki said on the phone, "You sound like you're in a good mood lately." The first Saturday in August, Nikki called and said Cole was grilling and it was just family, and did I want to come over and swim. I said what time. She stopped. She said, "You said what time." I drove over with a bowl of potato salad and the swimsuit in the same Dillard's bag. I sat in that driveway for 11 minutes. I'm not going to pretend I didn't. But it was a different kind of sitting, and when I was done I left the cardigan folded on the back seat and I went in through the front door in a sundress with the swimsuit already on underneath. Josie was at the counter with a popsicle. She saw me and she said, "Grandma." I said, "Hi baby." She said, "Are you swimming." I said, "Yeah. Grandma's swimming today." She looked at me for a second. Then she went out the back door yelling for her father. I sat on the step first. She came and sat on my knee in the water, and she stayed there, and then she pulled me out into the deeper part with both hands. We floated on a noodle for 20 minutes and Cole threw pennies and I went down after them and came up with my hair flat to my head, laughing, and I saw Nikki on the patio with her hand over her mouth. 2 weeks later I was in the drop-off line and a mother I've never spoken to leaned out of her car window. "Excuse me. Sorry. What are you wearing? I keep getting it when you come past." I told her it was a bar of soap. "A bar of soap." The way you repeat something you don't believe. "What's it called." I told her. She put it in her phone with the line still moving. Here's what I keep coming back to. For 2 years I thought the problem was me being stubborn. I thought I was a vain old woman who couldn't stand a swimsuit, and I was ashamed of that, and the shame is what kept me from ever saying one word about it to anybody. I was not being stubborn. Something had changed that nobody in my family could see, that I could not smell on myself, and that a 4 year old on a pool step registered instantly and had no way to tell me about. She did the only honest thing available to her. And I read it as a verdict on me and I acted on it for 2 years, and the cost of those 2 years was every Saturday of a childhood. She starts swim team in September. I'm going to every meet. If your grandchild has quietly stopped expecting you in the water. If you've been saying next time for so long that they've stopped asking. It might not be your age, and it was never something you did. It's called Kaori. The link's below. It costs less than 50 cents a shower, and they'll take it back inside 60 days if I'm wrong. They make it in small batches and the persimmons come once a year. When this one goes you're waiting until September. Order the bar. Take the shower. Let them come to you. We have a handstand contest on Sunday. I was on a swim team in 1979 and that child has no idea what's coming.