The Pool My Neighbors Snuck Into
The next Fourth of July
The next Fourth, we did not go to Merle’s.
Roy’s cousins understood. We had our own thing to do. We had the whole family out to the house, Karen and the grandkids and my sister and her crew, and we grilled and the little ones wore themselves out in the pool, the same pool, sitting exactly where the permit says, exactly where it has always been, not a pile of scrap in August like Brenda promised her party but full and clear and loud with kids.
We hung our own red, white, and blue bunting on Roy’s deck rail, over the spot where the scorch mark used to be before he sanded and refinished the whole board so you cannot even find it now. The gate has a new lock on it, a good one, and only three keys exist and I know exactly whose hands all three are in.
At some point that evening Brenda came out into her own backyard, on the other side of the fence, alone, with her arms crossed, and watched us the way she used to watch us. And I looked over, and I did the thing I have done to every soul in this town for thirty-one years whether they deserved it or not.
I waved.
She did not wave back. She went inside. And I turned around to a yard full of my own people and my own grandbabies screaming with joy in the water Roy and I waited our whole lives to give them, and I let her go, all the way, for good.
What I know now
People ask me, when I tell this, if I feel bad about how it went for Brenda. I have thought about it honestly, and here is my answer.
I did not do a single thing to her. I want that on the record. I never yelled. I never trespassed. I never made a copy of anybody’s key or filed a false anything or hung my party off somebody else’s deck. Every bad thing that landed on Brenda Vance, she carried into my backyard herself and set down on my table with a little pat like it belonged to her. I just left the cameras on and kept my head and let the truth do what the truth does when you stop getting in its way.
For thirty years I believed the way to handle a person like Brenda was to be quiet and mind my business and hope she got tired. And there is a place for that. But I learned something on that lawn chair under Merle’s maples, watching a woman brag into a camera she did not know was there.
Minding your business is not the same as letting people run you over. You can keep your dignity and still keep the receipts. You can wave at everybody in town and still lock your gate. You can be a soft old woman who does the books and cries in the laundry room, and still, when somebody hands you the whole case against themselves on the Fourth of July, be steady enough to simply say thank you and use it.
The finest thing I ever owned is a plastic pool in a backyard in a town nobody has heard of. It is still there. My grandbabies are in it right now, I can hear them from the kitchen where I am writing this. And the woman who tried to take it from me out of pure spite is on the other side of the fence, alone, with her arms crossed, watching a party she will never be invited to, in a pool she will never touch again.
I waited my whole life for the good stuff. Nobody, not Brenda Vance, not anybody, was going to talk me out of it once I finally had it in my hands.