Wednesday the second envelope came, from code enforcement. An unauthorized tap has been identified at the property line and must be removed within ten days. I called the number on the letter and got a voicemail box that was full.
The children’s plot died that week.
Two long beds by the gate, where the after-school kids put in cherry tomatoes in May and counted them every Friday like they were money. Sixty plants. By Thursday they were brown sticks with fruit still on them, wrinkled up small. Lila’s boy stood at the fence with one can of water he had filled at home, poured it on eleven dead plants, and then just stood there holding the can.
Friday afternoon a woman I had known for years stopped me at the gate with a clipboard.
We, the undersigned families of the Rowan Street Community Garden, request the immediate resignation of Nadine Kessler as treasurer.
Forty-one names. I read every one. There was a column for comments and somebody had written, in a child’s handwriting, the tomatoes were free.
“I’m not signing this,” the woman said. “I’m collecting it. I want you to know that.”
“Who has the tap?” I asked her. “The city says there’s an unauthorized tap. Did anyone ask whose side of the fence it’s on?”
She looked at me like I had started speaking another language, and I understood then that no one on that block had ever seen the tap, and no one was going to walk down an alley with a flashlight to find it.
That night I called Curtis Hale again and asked him for hourly usage, not the monthly summary. He went quiet.
“That’s a lot of rows, ma’am.”
“I’m being accused of tampering with the meter. I need to know what it did.”
“Give me a day,” he said. “And for what it’s worth, nobody who tampers with a meter runs it up four thousand dollars.”
The file came Monday morning. I opened it at the kitchen table that night and the rows went on for a long time.
The garden’s own watering was there, plain as a heartbeat: Tuesday and Saturday, ninety minutes, a few hundred gallons, then nothing at all. My mother’s beds, drinking what I had paid for.
And then between one o’clock and four o’clock in the morning, on forty-one nights running from the last week of May, the rows stacked up like a second ledger. A hundred and sixty of them. A hundred and seventy. Some nights a hundred and ninety. Every one of them three hundred gallons.
I put the column into the calculator twice. Two million one hundred thousand gallons.
The last row in the file was Friday, 2:45 a.m. After that the meter read nothing at all, because at 8:40 that morning a man in an orange vest had put a key in the ground and turned my garden off.
I sat there with my hand flat on the table.
At two in the morning I walked down to the garden with a flashlight. The chain on the gate was on. My padlock was on the chain. Every bed was dry as paper, and the strip in the shed still said ninety minutes, and the mulch between the beds had not been wet in four days.
I stood in the dark and turned the light along the fence, toward the yellow house, where the only water on that meter had been going for forty-one nights while I slept.
Three hundred gallons at a time. All of it leaving my garden without ever touching it.
I was on her steps at seven the next morning with the printout in a folder, before the heat came up.
She opened the door holding a dish towel and looked at the folder instead of at me.
“Forty-one nights,” I said. “Between one and four in the morning. The meter logged it in three-hundred-gallon clicks, and the clicks stopped the hour the city cut my line.”
