The Pool My Neighbors Snuck Into

She said it laughing. She said it while she was standing on my deck eating my neighbors’ cake off my table with a copied key in her pool bag.

I want you to understand what she had just done, on camera, with sound, at my own house.

She admitted she had made an illegal copy of my key.

She admitted she had been trespassing on my locked property.

And she admitted she had filed yet another false complaint with the county, a complaint she knew was false, because that setback had been measured and stamped and signed off years ago and she had personally watched it happen. She was not reporting a problem. She was trying to get the county to force us to destroy the one nice thing two old people had saved their whole lives for, out of pure spite, and she said so, out loud, into my camera, at my party she was throwing in my pool.

I stopped being angry right about then.

I want to be clear, because I have told this story a few times now and people always expect the next part to be rage. It was not rage. Somewhere in the middle of Brenda’s little speech, the fury drained right out of me and something a lot cooler and a lot steadier came in behind it. I actually smiled. Alma saw me smile and asked what on earth, and I said, “She just told me exactly how I am going to fix this.”

Because Brenda Vance, standing there so pleased with herself, had no idea she had just handed me everything.

The drive home

I did not tear out of Merle’s farm. I stayed the whole day, and I ate the hog roast, and I let Roy’s uncle win the horseshoe argument, and I did not tell most of the family what was on my phone because I wanted the day to be Roy’s day with his people, and there was nothing to be done from three hours away anyhow. That water was going to sit in the pool whether I ruined the reunion or not.

But on the drive home in the dark, I told Roy everything, and I played him the audio, and my husband, who is the mildest man I have ever known, a man who apologizes to furniture he bumps into, got very quiet and then said, “Play it again.”

I played it again.

He looked out the windshield at the county road going by and said, “Okay. We do this right. We do not go over there hollering. We do not touch her. We let the paper and the law do it, and we do it so clean she can never say we were the ones out of line.” That is my Roy. Thirty-four years married and he still knows how to be the smart one when I am the mad one.

So we made a plan on that dark road home, and we did not deviate from it, and it worked better than either one of us dreamed.