The Pool My Neighbors Snuck Into

The notification

At first I did not even look. It buzzed again. Then a third time, quick, one after another, which is not how a package delivery pings, and something in my stomach turned over before my brain caught up.

I pulled the phone out. Three motion alerts from the backyard camera, stacked up, one minute apart.

My first thought was an animal. We get deer that come up out of the ditch, and once a whole family of raccoons went at the pool cover like it owed them money. So I opened the app expecting a raccoon, half smiling already, ready to show Roy’s cousins a raccoon.

It was not a raccoon.

It was people. In my backyard. Walking through my gate.

I sat forward so fast the deviled eggs slid off my knee and I did not even notice until later there was a yellow smear on my good capris.

I knew them. Of course I knew them. That is a thing about a town like ours, you know everybody, and I knew every single face coming through my gate. There was Brenda, in a swimsuit with a gauzy cover-up, carrying a cooler like she was hosting. There was Dale behind her with a folding table under his arm. There were the Pruetts. There was Gary from the corner and his wife. There were two teenagers I did not know, and a woman I half recognized from Brenda’s church. A whole crowd of them, coming through my locked gate onto my property, on the Fourth of July, while my house sat empty and I sat three hours away with deviled eggs on my pants.

Swimsuits. Coolers. Grocery bags. Beach towels. A rolled-up something that turned out to be red, white, and blue bunting they proceeded to hang off my deck rail like it was theirs to decorate.

They had turned my pool, the finest thing I ever owned, the thing Roy and I waited our whole lives for, into the site of their Fourth of July party. While we were not even home. Behind the fence Brenda spent three weeks telling the whole county was an eyesore.

I could not speak. Roy’s cousin Alma leaned over and asked if I was all right, and I could not make a sentence. I just turned the phone toward her, and she watched Brenda Vance hang bunting off my deck, and Alma said a word I will not repeat that I had never once heard come out of a church lady in my life.

I watched the whole thing

I know I should have called somebody right then. The sheriff. My son-in-law. Somebody. And I nearly did. My thumb was over the phone icon.

But I will be honest with you: I watched instead. I sat in that lawn chair under Merle’s maples and I watched my neighbors have a party in my pool for the better part of an hour, because I could not look away, the way you cannot look away from a car wreck that is happening to you.

The gate, I need to tell you, was locked when we left. Roy tugged it. I watched him tug it. So the first thing that went through my head, watching Brenda swing that gate open like her own front door, was one cold question: how did she get in.

I got my answer soon enough. But first I got the party.

They did cannonballs. These are grown adults, some of them my age, doing cannonballs into the pool I put in so my grandbabies would have someplace soft to land. Dale set his folding table up on my deck and Brenda covered it with a red tablecloth and laid out a whole spread, chips and a fruit thing and a sheet cake, on my patio, like she had paid for the house herself. She set a tray down on my glass-top table with a little pat, the way you pat something that belongs to you, and I felt my left eye start to twitch and it did not stop for two days.

They put a speaker on my deck rail. One of the teenagers climbed up on Roy’s deck and did a flip off it into the pool, and Brenda laughed and clapped, and I thought about my son-in-law and Roy out there in the July heat last summer setting every screw, and I had to put the phone face-down on my leg and breathe.

Then I picked it back up. Because I am nothing if not stubborn, and I was going to see all of it.