The Pool My Neighbor Destroyed

I chose, mostly, to be sad for her. I want that on the record because of what came after. All summer I chose grace. I took her a plate at the Fourth. I waved every single time. I made the kids wave. I told Cole, who is old enough to have feelings about an unfair thing, that Mrs. Shaw was lonely and that lonely can look mean from the outside, and that we were going to be kind to her because kindness was free and it was the right thing and because you never know what a person is carrying.

I believed every word of that. I still mostly do. But I was wrong about one thing. I thought grace would be enough, on its own, to hold the line. I thought if I was kind enough, long enough, it would never come to anything. I was wrong. Some people read your grace as weakness, and they do not soften toward it. They sharpen.

So. Six in the morning, the second week of August. The diesel.

She had a key to Dale’s old skid steer and she knew how to run it, because she’d grown up on a dairy and there is nothing on a farm a girl like that can’t drive. She had come through the gap in the fence line where our properties meet, the gap Dale used to use to bring his mower over when he still mowed our ditch out of neighborliness, back when there was neighborliness. She had driven it across my grass, two deep black tracks the whole way, and she had put the bucket against the north wall of the pool and she was pushing.

I have never moved so fast in my life. I was out the back door barefoot on the gravel before I knew I’d decided to move. I was screaming her name. She could not hear me over the engine, or she pretended she couldn’t, and I will never know which, and that not knowing is its own small cruelty I carry.

The wall did not break all at once. That is the part I did not expect, the part I still see. It folded. The metal buckled in a long slow crease and then the liner gave and twenty thousand gallons of water came out sideways in one gray wave in the half light, and it hit me at the shins and nearly took my feet out, and it carried June’s unicorn float and Cole’s dive rings and a flip flop and my sweet-tea glass off the deck all in one rush across the yard and down toward the ditch. The pool went over like a tin can a boot had stepped on. The water kept coming for what felt like a full minute, this awful rushing sound, and then it was just mud, acres of it, and the frame lying bent and open like a broken thing, and Glenda sitting up there in the cab looking down at me.