The Pool My Neighbors Snuck Into

The worst thing about them was the complaining

For a long time I believed the worst thing about my neighbors was how much they complained.

That was before I found out what they were willing to do behind a locked gate. But back then, in the ordinary years, all I knew of Brenda and Dale Vance was noise. Brenda had an opinion on everything that happened north of Route 9, and most of those opinions came in the form of a complaint about somebody. The Hoffmans mowed too early. The kids on Sycamore rode their bikes in the road. The church rummage sale brought in the wrong kind of traffic. Somebody’s dog. Somebody’s fence. Somebody’s grass.

We live on the north edge of a small town in the middle of the country, the kind of place where the grain elevator is the tallest thing for twenty miles and everybody waves at everybody whether they like them or not. Roy and I bought our house thirty-one years ago, a plain two-story with a big flat backyard that runs down toward the ditch. Roy worked at the co-op most of his life. I did the books for the vet clinic in town until my knees told me it was time to sit down. We are not fancy people. We paid our house off two years ago, and the day the last statement came marked zero, Roy and I sat at the kitchen table and cried a little, because it took thirty years and both our whole lives to do it.

That paid-off house is the thing you have to understand. We did not inherit money. Every board and shingle on that place came out of packed lunches and skipped vacations and a lot of Saturdays doing our own repairs. So when we finally decided to put in a pool, it was not showing off. It was the one big thing we let ourselves have after a lifetime of not.

Our granddaughter is the reason, if you want the honest truth. Roy’s sister passed the winter before, and it hit him hard, and somewhere in the middle of that grief he said he wanted the grandkids to have someplace to splash while we were still young enough to watch them do it. Neither one of us is young. That is the point. We were done waiting on the good stuff.

We did everything by the book

I want to say this plainly because it matters to everything that came after: we did it all the right way.

It was an above-ground pool, a good big one, twenty-four feet across, set on a proper pad with a wooden deck Roy and our son-in-law built around one side so I could get in and out without murdering my knees. Roy pulled the permit at the county building office before he turned a single shovel of dirt. He had the setbacks measured. He had the electrical done by a licensed man out of the county seat, inspected and signed off. There is a fat manila folder in our filing cabinet with every stamped paper in it. I know that folder by heart now. I could tell you the permit number in my sleep.

We were proud of it. The first evening it was full and running clear, Roy and I sat on that deck with a couple of iced teas and watched the water go pink under the sunset, and I thought, well, there it is. There is the thing we waited our whole lives for. It is a plastic pool in a backyard in a town nobody has heard of, and it is the finest thing I have ever owned.

Brenda Vance saw it a different way.