The Pool My Neighbor Destroyed

That week was the worst of it, before anything good started. The pool was a bent heap and a field of drying mud, and the kids had nowhere to be. Cole did not ask about it. That was the thing that scared me, that he did not ask, that he had decided somewhere inside himself that asking would not help and that his job now was to be quiet so I would not have one more thing to carry. A ten year old should not know how to do that. June asked every day. June asked where her unicorn was, because the float had washed clean down into the ditch and lodged in the fence, and I went down and got it and hosed the mud off it and it sat in the garage, this bright dumb cheerful thing with nowhere to float, and every time I saw it I had to look away. I would lie awake and hear the quiet where the splashing used to be, and I would run the fight over in my head, me and lawyers and Glenda and a judge, and in every version of it the pool was still gone and my kids were still sitting in the house and the summer was still running out the window like that gray wave ran across the yard.

So I told Petey to write it all down, every bit of it, because the truth should be written down somewhere official, but to hold off on the charges. He looked at me like I was crazy. I told him I needed a few days. He said the trespass and destruction would still be there in a few days, and he was right, and I let it sit.

And then I did the thing that I think of, now, as the real beginning.

I went to the church fish fry.

The Harlow Volunteer Fire Department does a fish fry the third Friday of every month through the summer in the lot behind the Methodist church, and it is the closest thing our end of the county has to a town square. Everybody goes. You pay seven dollars and you get catfish and hushpuppies and slaw on a paper plate and you sit at long tables under the big oaks and you find out everything that has happened to everyone. That Friday was two days after the pool. My face was still swollen from crying and from not sleeping, and I almost didn’t go, and my sister made me go, and I took the kids, and I am so glad I did.