The Neighbor Who Stole My Electricity

The next two weeks were the worst of it, worse than the money, worse than the video. Because Vanessa got out ahead of me, the way people like her always do, and she is good at it, and I am not. I found out later she was texting the neighborhood group I was not part of, and talking over fences, and dropping it at the school pickup line, the whole warm fast machine of it. The quiet guy at the end of the court. Works nights, you know. Nobody really knows him. And now there are cameras. Watching the street. Watching the kids play. Somebody said he has been filming Vanessa’s little ones in their own driveway. You just never know about the quiet ones, do you.

I started getting the looks. A woman two doors down who used to wave stopped waving. A dad across the court herded his kids inside when I came out to get my mail. Somebody I had never met left a note in my box, unsigned, that said take your cameras down or people will find out what you are. And the worst one, the one that actually got to me, was Ed.

Ed is the oldest man on Delmar Court, retired from the county road crew, has lived here longer than I have. Ed and I were never close but he was decent to me, always had a nod and a word about the weather, and one time when my dad died Ed brought over a casserole his wife made and did not make a thing of it. Ed’s opinion mattered to me more than I would have admitted. And one evening Ed came down to the end of the court while I was checking my mail, and he did not nod, and he said, “Dale, I have known you a long time. I do not want to believe what people are saying. But you need to take that camera down. Whatever is going on with you, that is not right, watching those kids.” And he turned and walked home, and I stood there with my mail in my hand feeling like the ground had come out from under me.

I did not sleep right for those two weeks, and when you work nights, not sleeping right during the day is a slow poison. I would lie in my dark bedroom with the fan going and the sun pushing at the edges of the blinds, and instead of dropping off I would run the whole thing again and again, every look, every neighbor who stopped waving, that unsigned note in my box. I started making stupid mistakes on the forklift, the kind I had not made in twenty years, and my shift lead pulled me aside one night and asked if I was all right, and I told him I was, which was a lie, and he knew it was a lie and let it go, which is what decent men do for each other on a loading dock at three in the morning.