The Pool My Neighbor Destroyed
My neighbor destroyed our pool at dawn for the sound of my children laughing and the whole town made her regret it
The first thing I heard was the diesel.
It was not quite six in the morning, and that sound does not belong to that hour, not on our road. Our road is quiet at dawn. You hear the mourning doves and the gravel settling and, if the wind is right, the co-op trucks pulling out on the highway a half mile off. You do not hear an engine idling in your own backyard.
I lay there for a second with my eyes open, trying to place it. Russ was already gone. He drives for a gravel outfit out of Lebanon and he leaves before five most mornings, so his side of the bed was cold and the house was the kind of still it only gets when it is just me and the kids breathing in their rooms. The engine revved, dropped, revved again. Metal groaned somewhere close.
I got up. I did not grab a robe. I went down the hall in Russ’s old T-shirt and I pulled back the kitchen curtain over the sink, and I saw Glenda Shaw sitting up in the cab of her dead husband’s skid steer, in her yard shoes and her housecoat, backing the bucket into the wall of our pool.
I want you to understand what that pool was before I tell you what she did to it.
We live outside Harlow, Missouri, down in the bottom of the Ozark foothills where the hills aren’t tall but they’re everywhere, and the roads follow the creeks instead of the section lines. It is the kind of place people leave and don’t come back to, except we did. Russ grew up three miles from where we sleep now. I grew up a county over. We bought this little brick ranch nine years ago with a VA loan and a prayer, and it came with two acres and a view of a hayfield and, on the north side, Glenda and Dale Shaw.
The pool was a twenty-four foot above-ground, the round kind with the metal wall and the blue liner, nothing fancy. We did not buy it on a whim. We saved for it across two years. Russ took the extra Saturday runs when they came up, the ones that paid time and a half, and I did the books for the Farm Bureau office part time and we put the swim money in a coffee can on top of the refrigerator where the kids could watch it fill. Cole, my oldest, he is ten, and he counted that can like it was a Christmas calendar. June is seven, and June could not count that high but she knew the can meant swimming, and that was enough for her.