The Neighbor Who Stole My Electricity
Sharon looked from Mason to me to Vanessa across the party. And Vanessa, who had a radar for these things, was already coming over fast with her bright laugh turned all the way up, saying, “Mason, sweetheart, do not tell stories, come here,” reaching for him, trying to sweep him off before he could say anything else.
But it was too late, and everybody could feel it was too late, because a woman does not rush across a party to hush a little boy who is telling a lie. She rushes to hush one who is telling the truth.
That was my moment. My daughter had told me if it came, to be calm, to let the thing speak for itself and not make myself the loud one. So I did not raise my voice. I reached into my pocket and I took out my phone, and I said, to Sharon, to Ed who had come over, to anybody who wanted to look, “I have got a camera on my own garage. Everybody heard about that. Here is what it filmed. You can decide for yourselves.”
And I hit play and I turned the phone around.
There it was, on that little screen, passed from Sharon’s hand to Ed’s to the next person and the next. Two forty-seven in the morning. Vanessa in her robe. The pearl white SUV backed up to my dark garage. The orange cord across my grass. Her opening my outlet, plugging in, walking away. Night after night, because I had a week of it, all timestamped in the corner. And then I showed them the smart plug log, the neat rows of numbers, the kilowatt hours, the dollars, adding up night after night to three hundred and eighteen dollars off my meter over one summer.
The party went quiet the way a whole street can go quiet. Somebody turned the ballgame down.
Ed was the one who spoke first. He held my phone in his old hands and he watched it twice, and then he looked up at me, and his face was not angry anymore. It was ashamed. Not of me. Of himself. He handed the phone back and he said, loud enough for people to hear, “Dale. I owe you an apology in front of everybody, because I said something to you I had no business saying, and I believed the wrong person.” And he put his hand out and I shook it, and I will tell you my throat closed up so tight I could not have talked if I wanted to.