I crouched down and looked at the hose. It wasn’t new. The brass fittings were weathered. The hose had grass growing over it where it crossed under my fence. Not a week of growth, not a month—months, maybe longer. This hose had been here long enough for the lawn to start swallowing it. I disconnected it from my spigot, coiled the hose on my side of the fence, and closed the valve. Then I went inside, sat at my kitchen table, and started doing math.
An eighteen-thousand-gallon pool loses about an inch of water per week to evaporation in an East Texas summer. That’s roughly three hundred gallons per week. Add splash-out from her biweekly pool parties, filter backwash, and the waterfall feature running eight hours a day, and she was probably pulling five hundred to six hundred gallons a week through that hose. At thirty gallons a minute from my well, that’s twenty minutes of pump time per day just for her pool. Factor in the electricity to pump it. A one-horsepower submersible draws about fifteen amps at 240 volts. Twenty minutes a day, seven days a week, five months a year. I’d been paying to fill Denise Caldwell’s swimming pool—the pool where she floated on a two-hundred-dollar inflatable in a three-hundred-dollar bikini and told her friends she was living her best life. Her best life was funded by my well, my electricity, and my complete ignorance.
Two days later, the hose was back. Same spot, same green hose, same route. She hadn’t even tried to hide it differently. Just walked onto my property and reconnected it, like stealing water from a retired plumber was a minor errand between Pilates and whatever beautiful, expensive, heartless thing she did next. I disconnected it again. I drove to the hardware store and bought a locking hose bib, the kind with a key-operated valve that replaces the handle. Took me ten minutes to install. I pocketed the key and went on with my day.
Four days later, I walked around back. The locking hose bib was on the ground. Someone had taken a pair of bolt cutters to the brass lock cylinder and snapped it clean off. The green hose was reconnected. The spigot was running. I replaced it with a hardened steel model rated for commercial security. It lasted six days. Professional bolt cutters. Somebody had stood on my property and worked through a security-grade lock like they were opening a Christmas present they felt entitled to.
I drove to Silver Creek and knocked on Denise Caldwell’s door. She answered barefoot in a white Eres cover-up, her honey-blonde hair still wet from the pool, a glass of Sancerre in one hand. She was stunning. The kind of beautiful that makes you momentarily forget she’s a terrible human being, the way a coral snake is gorgeous right up until it kills you. She looked at my boots, my work jeans, my faded shirt—the full-body scan, head to toe, the way an art dealer looks at a painting they already know is a forgery.
