The Neighbor Who Stole My Electricity

I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone in my hand and I did the math a forklift man does automatically. Six dollars a night, most nights, since sometime in the spring. That was my doubled bill sitting right there in a tidy log. That was the money I would rather have sent to my daughter in Columbus. And that woman had stood over the fence and slotted me into a category and then run a cord across my grass and taken it while I was at work keeping the count straight on somebody else’s pallets.

I had her. Cold. Video and a metered log with timestamps and dollar amounts. Any reasonable person, shown that, would know exactly what happened.

So the next evening I walked over and I knocked, and I want you to see that I did the normal thing first, the neighborly thing, before any of the rest of it. Vanessa answered. I told her, calm as I could, that I knew she had been charging her SUV off my garage outlet, that my bill had doubled, and that I had it on camera, and I would appreciate her stopping and paying me back for the summer.

She did not even flinch. That is the part that still amazes me. She laughed a little, the way you laugh at a child, and she said, “Oh my gosh, Dale. It is a few cents. You live alone. You are barely even home. I have got two kids and a whole house to run. Are you seriously going to make this a thing?”

I said it was more than a few cents, that I had the meter readings, that it was over three hundred dollars now.

She crossed her arms. “You put a camera on us?” she said, and something changed in her face. It was not shame. It was calculation. “You have been filming my family? Filming my kids in their own driveway?”

And right there, standing on her gray porch, I watched Vanessa figure out that she was not going to fight this on whether she took the electricity. She was going to fight it on whether I was a creep with a camera. She had lost the true thing, so she reached for a different one, and she was quicker at it than I would ever be.

“Chad,” she called into the house, not taking her eyes off me. “Chad, come here. Dale’s been putting cameras on our kids.”

I left. There was nothing to say to that. I went home and I did not sleep.