The basement stairs came up at us with that rec center smell. The pool took up most of the floor, eleven feet by twenty-four, and the water was turning green from the deep end out while we stood there, moving like weather.
“What did you put in it?” Verona said. Her voice had gone up an octave.
“City dye,” Ruiz said. “It entered at the garden tap. It is in your pool. That is the whole test.”
Verona sat down on the bottom step in her housedress and put her face in her hands, and I felt nothing I had expected to feel. Not triumph. Something flatter than that.
The paperwork came fast after the dye. The city sent me a copy of everything because I had been the one making the complaint.
Usage adjustment, account 44 Rowan: 2,100,000 gallons transferred to account 42 Rowan. Account 42 balance $8,410. Service restored 3:40 p.m.
And a citation with a hearing date on it. Illegal cross-connection. Fine $1,250.
The water came back on that afternoon, and I opened the gate and stood in the garden while the drip line pushed water into forty-one dead beds, and Lila’s boy came down the block at a run with two cans.
Verona resigned as block association president by the end of that week, a one-paragraph letter read into the minutes at a meeting she did not attend. Her house had been under contract since May. In August the buyer’s inspector flagged an unpermitted pool in the basement, and the sale went back to pending, and I heard that from Desmond, who heard it from Marcus, and I did not ask again.
The garden committee met the last Tuesday of August, in the church hall this time, because it was cool enough to sit inside. Two items. Desmond moved to remove Verona from the water committee permanently, and that passed without discussion, and my hand went up with everyone else’s.
Then Lila asked whether Verona kept her plot.
The vote came out six to six. Everyone looked at me, because I keep the books and because it was my mother’s garden and because they had all signed a sheet asking for my resignation six weeks earlier and now they needed me to decide something.
I had a lawyer’s name written on the back of the petition envelope in my desk drawer. Defamation, the woman on the phone had called it, and she had used the word damages, and I had not called her back. I thought about that envelope, and about the child’s handwriting at the bottom of it, and how much I wanted somebody to pay.
“She keeps the plot,” I said. “Water committee, no. She doesn’t touch the meter again.”
That night I posted the meter record myself on the block association page, the redacted version the city sent, the whole flat column of it, with one line above it in my own words.
Paid in full, all four quarters. The usage was not mine. Read the rows.
I typed it slowly. I did not say anything about her pool.
The last week of August it went to ninety-four degrees, and I watered on the odd mornings with the hose and the cans, and I watered the far end too, because two of her tomato plants had come back off the roots and were setting fruit again in the heat.
She watched me from her porch with her coffee and did not come down. I did not wave. I filled the can, poured it slow at the base of each plant so it would go down instead of running off, and did the whole row.
Then I coiled the hose back on the hook by the shed, the way my mother taught me, and went home and made my own coffee, and the tomatoes came in red that September and she ate them, and I know that because I was in my kitchen, watching.
