The Neighbor Who Stole My Electricity
The night it got the worst, I called my daughter in Columbus. I did not mean to dump the whole thing on her, but it came out, all of it, the bill and the cord and the camera and Ed and the note. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Dad, you did not do anything wrong. You know that, right? You put a camera on your own garage because somebody was stealing from you. That is the whole story.” And I said it did not matter what the whole story was if the street had already decided, and she said, “Then you make them look at the story. You do not argue with them. You just make them look.” She is smarter than I ever was. She got that from her mother, and it is about the only thing from that marriage I am grateful for.
I could have called the sheriff. I thought about it hard. But you have to understand what that would have looked like from the outside. The strange man who works nights and puts up cameras calls the law on the nice young mother with two kids. Vanessa would have cried, and she cries pretty, and I would have been the villain of that story before the deputy got back in his car. The truth was on my side but the truth was locked inside my phone, and a phone is easy to wave off. He edited it. He is obsessed. Look at him. I needed the truth to come out somewhere I could not be the only one holding it. I needed people to see it with their own eyes, all at once, in a place where Vanessa could not spin it before they made up their minds.
I did not have to wait long, because the neighborhood block party was coming.
Every Labor Day, Delmar Court closes off the end of the cul-de-sac and has a cookout. Sharon, who lives at the bend and organizes everything on the street, sets up tables and a couple of canopies, everybody brings a dish, the kids ride bikes in the closed-off street, and somebody wheels a TV out onto their porch for the ballgame. It is the one day a year the whole court is in one place. I had gone maybe twice in eleven years, always felt like a guest at somebody else’s family reunion, and this year I almost did not go at all, because I knew what the whole street thought of me by then. But my daughter, when I told her the whole thing on the phone, said, “Dad, you go. You go and you stand right in the middle of it. If you hide, they win.” So I went.