The Pool My Neighbor Destroyed

She did not look sorry. I need you to know that. I have thought about her face every day since and there was no sorry in it. There was something closer to satisfaction, a tightness around her mouth like a job was done. She throttled the engine down. In the sudden quiet I heard, behind me, my children.

They were at the glass of the back door. Both of them. Cole had June by the hand. They had seen it. June was crying the way little kids cry when they do not yet have the words for the size of the thing, just open-mouthed and silent, and Cole was not crying. Cole was staring at Glenda with a look I had never seen on my boy’s face and I hope to God I never see again, because it was the look of a child learning that an adult can want to hurt you and smile.

That is the moment, if you want to know, when something in me changed. Not when the water hit me. When I turned and saw my son’s face.

Glenda backed the skid steer off my grass and through the gap and parked it by her shed and went inside and shut her door. Like it was nothing. Like she’d finished the dishes.

Here is what everybody expects you to do next, and here is what I did not do.

Everybody expects you to call a lawyer. My sister, when I called her, the first thing out of her mouth was “you sue her, Dana, you take that woman’s house.” And I will not lie to you, for about an hour that morning that was all I wanted. I wanted her punished. I wanted men in suits and a judge and her name in the paper and the law to come down on her like the wall came down on me. Petey Burch came back out, and this time he wrote it up, and he told me straight that this was destruction of property and trespass and that I could press charges and likely would win, and that his sergeant wanted me to, because Glenda had been a thorn to that department for two years and they would love to be done with her.

And I stood in my muddy yard with my coffee going cold and I thought about it. I really did.

But I kept looking at Cole’s face. Not the face at the window. His face right then, following me around the yard, waiting to see what his mother was going to do, learning from me what you do when someone hurts you. And I thought: if I spend the next year of my life in a fight, if I let this become about punishing her, then she wins the summer anyway. She takes August and she takes all of fall and she makes my son into a boy who watched his mother go to war over a swimming pool. The pool was already gone. I could not get the pool back by taking her house. I could only get my children’s summer back by refusing to give her the rest of it.