The Pool My Neighbors Snuck Into

The complaints started before the water did

The Vances moved in about nine years ago, into the brick ranch that shares our north property line. From the beginning Brenda ran the road like it was hers, standing at the end of her driveway with her arms crossed, watching, and you always got the feeling you were being graded.

The day the delivery truck brought the pool components, Brenda was at the fence before the driver had the gate open.

“You cannot possibly be putting that in,” she said. Not hello. Not good morning. “That is going to be an eyesore. That is going to bring water into my yard. That is going to be a mosquito farm.”

I told her, politely, that it was permitted and set back and that the drainage had been engineered, using the exact words the county man used, because I figured facts would settle her down.

Facts do not settle a person like Brenda. Facts are just the thing she argues with.

For the three weeks it took to build, she made our lives a small daily misery. She called the sheriff twice during broad daylight hours, ten in the morning both times, to report that the construction was disturbing the peace. The deputy who came out the second time was a young fellow named Colby whose mother I did the books for, and he stood in our yard looking embarrassed, hat in his hands, and said, “Mrs. Kessler, I am real sorry, she called again, I have to write that I came.” I told him to write whatever he needed to. Roy offered him a lemonade. Colby drank it standing up, apologized twice more, and left.

Brenda called the county building office claiming we had no permit. They pulled the file, saw the permit, and told her so. She called back a week later claiming the electrical was not up to code. An inspector came out, on her complaint, checked it, and signed it off a second time, which he was mildly irritated about because he had already signed it once.

She told Loretta Pruett, who tells everybody, that “people like the Kesslers” were “the reason the neighborhood is going downhill.” People like us. Thirty-one years on that lot. Both of us born within forty miles of that kitchen table. I did not know what people like us meant, exactly, except that it meant she had decided we were beneath her and above reproach was her natural station.

I cried about it once, in the laundry room where Roy would not see, because it is a small mean thing to be told you are ruining a place you have loved your whole life. Then I wiped my face and decided I was not going to give Brenda Vance one more tear.