The Pool My Neighbors Snuck Into

I minded my business

Here is what I did once the pool was finished and the water was clear.

Nothing.

I did not invite the Vances over. I did not send a plate of anything across the fence to make peace, the way my mother would have told me to. I did not stand out there and splash loud on purpose to spite them, though Roy joked about it. I simply used the pool I had paid for, on the property I owned, behind the fence Brenda had complained about, and I kept my end of the road quiet and neat and my nose out of everybody’s yard.

We had the grandkids over most weekends. My daughter Karen would bring them out on a Saturday and we would grill and the little ones would wear themselves out in the water and fall asleep in the truck on the way home with their hair still smelling like sunscreen. Those were some of the best days I have had in years. Brenda would sometimes be out at her fence with her arms crossed, watching, and I learned to not even see her. I would wave, the way you wave at everybody in a town like ours, and turn back to the kids.

Roy put a lock on the gate that summer. Just good sense, because there is a big body of water back there and neighbor kids and we did not want a tragedy on our conscience. It was a simple keyed padlock on the gate latch, and we each kept a key, and there was a spare on a hook in the mudroom. That lock is going to matter later, so remember it.

The one thing I did do, and thank the Lord I did, was let Roy talk me into cameras.

Our son-in-law is in security systems over in the county seat, and he had been after us for a couple of years to put a couple of cameras up, one over the driveway and one on the back corner of the house looking down over the deck and the pool. I always said no, thought it was more than country people needed. That spring I said yes, mostly to make him feel useful, and he set them up to buzz my phone if anything moved back there after dark or while we were away. I barely thought about them after that. They were just two gray boxes under the eave.

The Fourth of July

Every year Roy’s family does a reunion on his cousin Merle’s farm about three hours south, on the Fourth, and every year I would not trade it for anything. There is a hog roast. There is a horseshoe pit that has settled arguments and started three of them. It is loud and hot and full of people who share Roy’s chin, the one day a year the whole scattered clan lands in the same pasture.

So that morning, the Fourth, Roy and I loaded the truck before dawn. I made my two pans of scalloped corn and wrapped them in towels to keep warm. Roy checked the gate lock out of habit, tugged it, made sure it was shut and keyed. We backed out at six and drove south into the sunrise.

I remember thinking, somewhere around the second hour, how nice it was that the house was sitting back there quiet and clean and empty. Locked up. Minding its own business. Just like me.

We got to Merle’s around nine. I set my corn on the long table under the maples, found Roy’s cousins, and settled into a lawn chair in the shade, and for the first time in a long while I felt all the way loose, the way you only do around people who knew you before you were old.

That was the state I was in, iced tea sweating in my hand and a paper plate of somebody’s deviled eggs on my knee, when my phone buzzed against my leg.