The Pool My Neighbor Destroyed

I did not do much of the lifting that Saturday. They would not let me. Every time I picked up an end of something, some man would take it out of my hands, and Carla would steer me back to the shade with a plate I did not ask for. So I stood on my own back steps most of the day and I watched. I watched Harlan Pell holler contradictory orders from a lawn chair and nobody mind him. I watched the pastor, who is a soft indoor man, go home at noon and come back in work clothes with a posthole digger. I watched two teenage boys who had been dragged there against their will on a Saturday slowly stop checking their phones and start to care, start to want the thing to come out right, and when the water finally went in one of them whooped like he’d done it himself, and I suppose he had. I watched my daughter hand out bottles of warm pop to grown men like she was the mayor. I had lived among these people my whole life and paid my taxes and taken my casseroles to the funerals and I thought I knew what a neighbor was. I did not know. Not until I stood on those steps and watched forty of them spend a day of their one short life to put the sound of my children back in the air.

My kids swam that evening until the stars came out. June made everyone watch her bubbles, every single time, like it was the first time. Cole did his flip off the new ladder for an audience of forty people who had given up a Saturday for him, and when he came up out of the water he was laughing, and I watched the hard thing that had been in his face since that morning at the glass just come off of him, like it washed off in the water, and I had to go inside for a minute so the kids would not see their mother standing in the yard crying over a swimming pool.

That is how my children got their summer back. Not from a judge. From a fish fry and forty neighbors and a man named Dewey who knew my daddy.

Now I will tell you about Glenda, because I promised you this was not a story about a pool.

She watched the whole thing. Her kitchen window looks down on my yard the same as mine looks up at hers. Forty trucks and forty people spent a Saturday twenty yards from her back door, laughing and hammering and hauling, and not one of them so much as looked her way. Nobody went and yelled at her. Nobody egged her house. Harlan told the men, and the men told the boys, that there’d be none of that, that we would not become her, and there was none of it. We just built the pool. We built it loud. We built it in the full light of day where she could see every single neighbor she had choose my children over her, and we let that be the whole of it.