Patricia Langford was treated for a bacterial skin infection. Three other women required medical attention. Shelley Voss told her husband she would never attend another pool party for the rest of her life. Her husband told Curtis he’d never been happier about anything his wife had ever said. The new HOA president was David Chen, an engineer, a reasonable man, and the first person in Silver Creek history to hold the office without ever measuring a neighbor’s grass. His first act: a handwritten apology. Second: repair my fence on the HOA’s dime. Third: fire Gerald Nicks. Fourth: abolish the garage-door color rule. He told the board, “If someone’s garage door is beige instead of eggshell, I think we’ll survive.”
Curtis and I sat on my porch the evening after the final hearing. The septic system had been returned to its normal configuration—well water to the spigot, effluent to the drain field, everything flowing where it was supposed to flow. My electricity bill had dropped one hundred eighty dollars the first month after the hose stopped. My well pump ran twenty minutes a day the way it was designed to.
“You know what gets me?” Curtis said, sipping his beer.
“What?”
“She had city water the entire time. Her house is connected to the Nacogdoches municipal system. She could have filled that pool from her own hose for about forty dollars a month. She stole yours because it was free. And she billed the HOA for it because she could. And she got away with it because she looked like that.” He shook his head. “The most expensive pool in the county, and she couldn’t spend forty dollars a month to fill it. Honestly.”
I looked at the sunset—pink and gold through the pines, the same sunset my grandfather watched from this same porch. The brass tag was still on the spigot. I’d left it there, not as a trophy, as a reminder.
“Curtis, some people don’t steal because they need to. They steal because they believe they’re entitled to. They steal because they’re beautiful enough and arrogant enough to believe the rules were written for other people. And the day you stop letting them, that’s the day they find out what they’re really entitled to.”
Curtis raised his beer.
“To plumbing.”
“To plumbing,” I said.
We watched the sun go down. The well pump clicked off in the distance, right on schedule. Twenty minutes, just the way it should be.
