The Neighbor Who Stole My Electricity

The thing you need to understand about me is that I notice numbers. I have worked the overnight shift at the regional food warehouse out on Route 9 for twenty-two years, running a forklift and counting pallets in the dark while the rest of the county sleeps, and when you spend two decades making sure the count on the sheet matches the count on the dock, you get to where a number that is wrong will wake you up out of a dead sleep. So when my electric bill came in at two hundred and eighty-one dollars in a month I had barely been home to run the air conditioner, I did not shrug it off. I sat down at my kitchen table with the bill and the one from the year before, and I stared at them, and I knew in my gut that somebody, somewhere, was stealing from me.

I just did not know yet that she lived forty feet away, or that by the time it was over she would have half my street believing I was the criminal.

My name is Dale. I am forty-seven. I have lived in the same little brick ranch on Delmar Court since I was twenty-five, back when I bought it with my wife before the marriage went the way it went. She has been gone eleven years now, moved down to Georgia, and my daughter is grown and out in Columbus, so it is mostly just me and the dog and a house that is too quiet during the day when I am trying to sleep. I keep to myself. I will not pretend otherwise. I work nights, I sleep days, and a man who lives like that gets a reputation on a street full of families whether he earns it or not. The kids are at school when I am asleep and I am at work when the grownups are grilling in their backyards, so I have always been the quiet guy at the end of the court that nobody quite knows. That mattered later. Keep it in your mind.

The new people moved into the flipped house next door in the early spring. It had sat empty a year, and some outfit bought it, put in the gray floors and the black windows everybody wants now, and slapped it on the market for a number that made the older neighbors whistle. The couple that bought it were named Vanessa and Chad. Younger than me, late thirties maybe. Two kids. And in the driveway, from the first day, sat a brand new electric SUV, one of the big ones, pearl white, that costs more than I make in a year and a half. They kept it spotless. Chad washed it in the driveway on Sundays like it was a member of the family.