My Neighbors Son Threw A Pool Party In My Backyard So I Taught Them A Lesson
Every Saturday morning, while the rest of our neighborhood slept in, my husband Chuck would be outside before eight o’clock, cleaning the pool.
I’d stand at the kitchen window with my coffee and watch him. Skimming leaves off the surface in long, slow sweeps. Vacuuming the bottom. Scrubbing the waterline on his knees with a stiff little brush. Holding the chemical test tubes up to the sunlight and squinting at the colors like a scientist.
By lunchtime, he’d finally lean against the pool net, wipe his forehead with the back of his arm, and grin at me through the screen door.
“Now it looks effortless,” he’d say.
I’d bring him a glass of lemonade.
“It looked effortless before,” I’d tell him.
“Exactly.” He’d point the skimmer pole at me like a teacher with a pointer. “That’s because you didn’t see the work.”
Forty-one years, he said that. Every single Saturday.
I didn’t understand what he meant until five years after he died, when my next-door neighbor and her sixteen-year-old son spent four hours and thirty-seven minutes finding out for themselves.
My name is Abigail Lindqvist. Everybody calls me Abby. I’m sixty-eight years old. I taught third grade for thirty-four years at Pine Hollow Elementary, and I can still silence a room with one raised eyebrow.
Chuck built that pool himself.
The summer of 1985. We’d been married six years and had a three-year-old daughter, Phoebe, and a baby on the way, and a backyard that was mostly crabgrass and a rusty swing set. Chuck was a civil engineer for the county. He spent his days designing drainage ditches, and he came home one night in May and said, “Abby, I’m going to build us a pool.”
“You don’t know how to build a pool.”
“I know how water moves,” he said. “That’s ninety percent of it.”
It took him nearly two summers.
He dug the hole with a rented backhoe and a shovel. He poured the concrete himself, with his brother Gus and three men from his office who he paid in beer and barbecue. He laid every single brick around the edge by hand, kneeling on a folded towel, with a string line and a level. He built the flower beds beside it. He built a little waterfall at one end out of river rocks he hauled home one at a time in the trunk of our station wagon.
When it was done, he stood at the edge in his swim trunks with his hands on his hips and looked at it for a long time.
His palms were covered in blisters. Some had popped. Some were still raw.
“Worth every blister,” he said.
Then he did a cannonball into the deep end, and Phoebe screamed with joy, and the splash soaked me to the skin.
Every birthday party happened in that pool. Every Fourth of July barbecue. Every graduation. Our son Danny learned to swim there. Phoebe got engaged there, on a summer night in 2009, when her boyfriend dropped to one knee on the diving board and nearly fell in.
Our grandchildren learned to swim there too. Chuck taught every single one of them. He’d stand in the shallow end with his arms out and say, “I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.” And they’d trust him, and let go of the edge, and kick.
Chuck died five years ago. A stroke. He was out in the backyard on a Saturday morning, kneeling by the pool, scrubbing the waterline.
I found him there.
I’m not going to talk about that part.
After the funeral, people kept telling me I should sell the house. Too big for one person. Too much upkeep. That pool must be so much work, Abby.
I didn’t sell.
I kept Chuck’s Saturday routine alive instead. Every week. I wasn’t as good at it as he was. I was slower, and my knees complained, and the first year I turned the water green twice. But I did it.
Because every splash in that pool still sounded like one of our grandchildren laughing.
Because when I knelt at the edge with his brush in my hand, I could almost feel him beside me.
Unfortunately, not everyone saw the pool that way.
My next-door neighbor, Denise, saw it as free entertainment.
Denise moved in two years ago, after the Hendersons retired to Arizona. She was in her late forties. Divorced. Blond highlights, very white teeth, and a laugh you could hear from the street. She sold real estate and drove a white SUV with her face on a magnet on the door.
She had one son. Brandon. Sixteen years old.
She still called him “Brandy.”
He was taller than both of us, with long arms and big feet and a mop of brown hair he was always flipping out of his eyes. He had the permanent, relaxed expression of a boy convinced that consequences only happened to other people.
When they first moved in, Denise brought me a plate of store-bought cookies on a paper plate. She stood on my porch and talked for forty-five minutes about her divorce, her ex-husband’s new girlfriend, and her blood pressure.
Then she looked past me, through my house, out the back windows.
“Oh my gosh,” she said. “Is that a pool?”
The first time I caught her inside my backyard, it was a Tuesday in July.
I’d gone to the dentist. I came home an hour early because they’d had a cancellation.
I walked into the kitchen, set down my purse, and looked out the window.
Denise was floating in the middle of my pool on one of my inflatable loungers. The yellow one Chuck bought for our fortieth anniversary. She was wearing sunglasses and a big floppy hat and holding a can of seltzer.
I went outside.
She saw me and smiled. Not embarrassed. Not even a little bit.
“Oh! You’re home early!”
I blinked at her.
“Denise. You have a key to my gate?”
“No.”
She pointed toward the fence between our yards.
“Brandy climbed over and unlocked it from the inside.”
Brandon was sitting on the edge of the diving board with his feet in the water, scrolling on his phone. He looked up and gave me a little wave.
“Hey, Miss Abby.”
I folded my arms.
“Denise. You really can’t come into my yard without asking.”
She waved one hand at me from the lounger. Dismissive. Like she was shooing a fly.
“Oh, Abby! It’s only a pool. We just wanted to cool off. It’s ninety-five degrees.”
I looked around.
My patio cushions had been moved off the chairs and thrown on the deck. Wet footprints covered the bricks Chuck had laid. Three empty soda cans sat on the little table beside Chuck’s favorite lounge chair. The blue-striped one. The one nobody sat in. Not even me.
“I would’ve said yes if you’d asked,” I said.
“See?” Denise smiled proudly, like I’d proved her point. “So what’s the difference?”
“The difference,” I said, “is that you didn’t.”
She laughed.
She actually laughed, like I’d told a joke.
From that day forward, it became a pattern.
I’d look out the kitchen window, and there they’d be.
Brandon cannonballing into the deep end. Denise reading a magazine under my umbrella. Brandon’s music playing from a little speaker propped on the diving board. Denise’s towel draped over the back of Chuck’s chair.
I started locking the gate with a padlock. Brandon learned the combination by watching me open it from his bedroom window. I changed it. He learned it again.
Once, I came home from the grocery store with my arms full of bags, and Brandon was standing on the diving board teaching two of his friends how to do a backflip.
He saw me come through the gate and looked embarrassed.
For exactly three seconds.
“Hey, Miss Abby.”
“Everybody out,” I said.
It was my teacher voice. Thirty-four years of third graders. His two friends scrambled out of the water so fast one of them slipped on the bricks. They grabbed their towels and ran out the gate without a word.
Brandon took his time.
Denise, who’d been lying on one of my lounge chairs, didn’t move at all.
“Oh, relax, Abby,” she said, without opening her eyes. “They’re good kids.” She sighed dramatically. “You really are protective over this pool.”
I set my grocery bags down on the bricks.
“My husband built it,” I said. “With his own hands. It’s part of our family.”
She opened one eye and shrugged.
“It’s still just a pool.”
That sentence stayed with me for weeks.
It’s still just a pool.
Not because it was rude, though it was.
Because she honestly believed it.
She looked at that backyard and saw blue water and some bricks. She couldn’t see forty years of birthday parties. She couldn’t see Chuck kneeling on a folded towel with a string line. She couldn’t see him standing in the shallow end with his arms out, telling a terrified four-year-old, I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.
She saw blue water.
Nothing more.
One afternoon in August, I tried a different approach.
I invited Denise over for coffee.
She actually looked surprised. She came over in a sundress and sat at my kitchen table and admired my curtains and told me about a house she was trying to sell with “a bathroom only a mother could love.”
After about twenty minutes of polite conversation, I set down my cup.
“Denise,” I said. “I don’t think you realize what that backyard means to me.”
She smiled sympathetically. She reached across the table and patted my hand.
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