He sounded tired in a way I had heard maybe twice in nine years. “Your mother put it in when the garden was new. Nobody’s looked at it since, because nobody had a reason to.”
He came in boots with a work light on his belt, and we went down the strip between my fence and hers where the lilacs have grown into each other so badly you have to turn sideways. He counted fence posts under his breath. At the ninth one he stopped and put the light into the gap.
“There.”
I had to press my cheek to the pickets to see it. A brass tap, green at the joints, screwed into a pipe that came up on the wrong side of the fence. Her side.
“Easement,” Desmond said. “Our line crosses under her lot to get to the main. That tap sat on our side of the wire until her husband put this fence up in 2011 and pulled it four feet over.”
The gate was not latched. It swung in when he pushed it with two fingers, and we walked onto her property in the last of the light. I knew what it was while I was doing it.
The tap had a brass Y splitter on it, both ends open, and the threads were bright. Bright means used, means taken off and put back until the metal shines. There was water standing in the low spot of the mulch, black and flat, the day after the city took the pressure off.
Then I saw the scar.
A pressed trench in the mulch, wide as my wrist, running from the tap along the foundation, under the hydrangeas, past the downspout, into the window well under her basement window. The mulch in it was still dark. The line of it went in under the glass.
I kept the light on it.
“Nadine.”
“I see it.”
“Say what you see.”
“Somebody ran a hose from the garden’s water to her basement.”
“That’s what I see too.” He clicked the light off, which made the yard darker than before. “And I don’t like the part where I’m standing here.”
Her voice came from the porch. “What are you doing behind my gate?”
She was in the doorway with her arms folded, and she did not look surprised. That is the thing I keep coming back to with her. She never once looked surprised.
“Verona, the tap behind your gate is the garden’s.”
“This is my property.”
“The tap is the garden’s. It’s on the easement. It’s on the garden’s meter.”
“The tap is my house’s water.” She said it evenly, the way she reads motions at meetings. “It has been my house’s water since before you were treasurer of anything.”
“Then what’s the hose?”
“There’s no hose.”
Desmond put the light back on and held it on the mulch, and the scar lay there under it, dark and wrong and perfectly straight. She looked at it for maybe two seconds. Her jaw moved once.
“You bring a man onto my property at night to shine a light at my house,” she said. “I want you both gone. I’ll call the police.”
“Call them,” I said. My voice cracked in the middle of it and I hated that. “Call them and tell them about the hose.”
The door shut. The porch light went out. We walked back through the gate and I pulled it closed behind me until the latch clicked, and we stood in the alley not saying anything.
No police came.
Monday there was a notice taped to my front door, a city form with a case number on it. The complainant’s name was blacked out and did not need to be.
Complaint received: unauthorized alteration of metering equipment at 44 Rowan Street. An inspector will examine the meter and service line within ten business days.
I read it three times on my own step. Then I put it in the folder with everything else, and I want to be honest about what I felt, because it was not fear. It was cold relief. It was in writing now. That was worth something.
