The Pool My Neighbor Destroyed
The laughing is what Glenda could not stand.
I need to tell you about Glenda, because if you don’t understand her you will think this story is about a pool, and it is not.
Glenda Shaw was maybe sixty-eight that summer. Her husband Dale had died two winters before, a stroke in the feed store parking lot, gone before the ambulance made it out from town. They never had children. Dale had been a quiet man who waved and fixed small engines for half the county out of his shed, and when he was alive Glenda had been sharp but bearable. After he died she went all the way sharp. The shed went cold. The yard she had always kept like a magazine went to seed, which for Glenda was the same as grief, I think, though she would have cut her own tongue out before she called it that.
She started with notes. The first one came in June, folded under our wiper on my car, in her tight little schoolteacher hand. “The noise from your property is excessive and begins too early.” It did not begin too early. My kids are not allowed in the water before ten in the morning, Glenda’s own rule enforced by me, because I am not a monster and I know sound carries on a still road. I wrote back, nice as I could, a note of my own left in her mailbox, saying I was sorry the kids carried and that we’d keep it reasonable and that she was welcome anytime to come sit on the deck.
She did not come sit on the deck.
The notes kept coming. Then she called the sheriff. Twice. Both times a deputy came out, a young one named Petey Burch who went to school with Russ’s cousin, and both times he stood in my yard red in the face and apologized to me, because there is no ordinance in our county against children laughing in a swimming pool at two in the afternoon. He told me, quiet, that she had called about “screaming.” He said she’d told dispatch the kids “screamed like animals.” He told me to try to keep the peace and he got in his car and left, and I stood there with June’s water wings in my hand and I did not know whether to be angry or just sad for a woman who heard my daughter’s bubbles and thought of animals.