The Pool My Neighbor Destroyed

I did not go there to tell on Glenda. I want that understood. I had decided I was not going to be the woman who ran around the county telling everyone what my neighbor did. That felt like getting down in the mud with her. So when Carla Dillard, whose kids swam in our pool all summer, asked me how we were doing and where the kids had been all week, I just said we’d had some trouble with the pool and it was done for the season. I tried to leave it there.

But June was sitting on the bench next to me, and June is seven, and seven year olds do not know how to leave a thing there. June looked up at Carla with her whole broken little heart and said, “Mrs. Shaw smashed it with the digger because we were too loud.”

The table went quiet. Not all at once, the way a room does in a movie, but in a spreading way, person leaning to person, until a whole stretch of that long table under the oaks was looking at me. And I did not have it in me to soften it or explain it away. I just nodded. I said, yes. That was true. And I told it plain, no heat in it, just the facts, the dawn and the diesel and the wall folding and the kids at the glass. I did not call her names. I did not need to. The facts were enough and I let the facts do the work.

I have lived in this county my whole life and I have never seen anything move the way that story moved through that fish fry. By the time I had finished my plate, people three tables over knew. Men I had not spoken to in a year came and stood by me and did not know what to say and said it anyway. Old Harlan Pell, who farms the ground behind both our places and who has not, to my knowledge, had a kind word for a living soul since the Carter administration, Harlan Pell walked over with his cane and stood in front of me and said, “You got a camera on your place?”

I said no.

He said, “I do. I got one on my shed looks right down that fence line, on account of somebody’s been in my diesel. It runs all night.” He chewed on that a second. “It’d of seen your whole yard.”

I did not sleep that night either, but for a different reason.