My Neighbors Son Threw A Pool Party In My Backyard So I Taught Them A Lesson
The way they thought.
Denise really believed it was just a pool. That it was just there. Clean and blue and sparkling, all on its own, like rain. Like sunshine. Something you could use whenever you wanted, for free.
She’d never once thought about what it took to keep it that way.
She’d never seen the work.
I got up from the table and looked out the kitchen window.
At Chuck’s pool, with the plastic cups floating in it.
And then at the pool shed, standing in the corner of the yard, its door closed, the way Chuck had left it.
A very interesting idea began to take shape.
“Oh, Chuck,” I whispered to the empty kitchen. “I know exactly what Saturdays look like, honey.”
I could almost hear him laughing.
Before Denise and Brandon ever used my pool again, they were going to find out too.
The next morning, I sat behind my bedroom curtains with my coffee and watched Denise’s driveway.
At 9:15, Denise came out of her front door dragging a rolling suitcase, shrieking into her phone at someone.
“Two whole days at my sister’s! I know! I KNOW! She’s making us go to the lake! Brandy, get in the car!”
Brandon shuffled out behind her in flip-flops, carrying a duffel bag. They loaded the SUV with Denise’s face on the door and backed out of the driveway.
They didn’t look at my house once. My car was in the garage. The blinds were closed. As far as they knew, I was still in Millbrook.
Perfect.
As soon as their SUV turned the corner, I picked up the phone and called Hector.
Hector Ramirez owned Blue Ridge Pool Service. He’d done the repair work on Chuck’s pump twenty years ago, and he and Chuck had become friends. They used to talk about chlorine levels for an hour at a time while I rolled my eyes. Hector had been a pallbearer at Chuck’s funeral.
“Abby?” he said. “Everything okay?”
“Hector,” I said. “I need a favor. And I need it today.”
He came over at ten with two of his guys and a truck full of equipment.
He walked through my side gate and stopped. He looked at the confetti. The cups. The flamingo. The broken whiskey barrels.
He took off his cap.
“Abby,” he said slowly. “What happened?”
I showed him the video on my phone.
He watched the whole thing standing on the bricks. When he got to the part where Denise bowed, his jaw went tight.
When he got to the part where she sat down in Chuck’s blue-striped chair, he said a word in Spanish I won’t repeat.
He handed my phone back.
“What do you need?”
“I need it clean,” I said. “Every piece of trash. Every bit of confetti. I need the water clear. I need the patio pressure-washed. And I need three new whiskey barrels.”
“That last part’s going to be tricky.”
“I know a guy at the brewery in town,” I said. “He saves them for me.”
Hector put his cap back on.
“Chuck’s pool,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
By lunchtime, the water sparkled again.
Every cup and can was gone. Every piece of confetti had been picked out of the flower beds by hand, one sparkle at a time. Hector’s guy, Luis, did that part with tweezers, I’m not kidding. The patio had been pressure-washed until the bricks looked new. The pizza grease was scrubbed out of the cushions. The dead flamingo was gone.
The brewery delivered three whiskey barrels at two. I cut them in half myself with Chuck’s old hand saw in the garage, the way he’d taught me, and Luis helped me line them and fill them, and I replanted the geraniums I could save.
Looking at it, nobody would ever have guessed that thirty teenagers had treated my backyard like a public beach.
Hector stood beside me and looked at it.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s clean. Now what?”
I smiled.
“Now,” I said, “I’m going to make it dirty again.”
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
I didn’t mean really dirty. I wasn’t interested in making Denise clean up after her own party. Hector had already done that. And honestly, nobody should have to scrub pizza grease out of patio cushions twice.
What I wanted was for her to understand something she’d never bothered to notice.
The effort.
The ordinary, boring, everyday effort that Chuck had poured into that backyard every single Saturday for almost forty years. The effort that made it look effortless.
After Hector left, I walked across the yard and unlocked Chuck’s old pool shed.
I hadn’t been inside it much since he died. I’d go in for the brush and the test kit on Saturdays and come right back out. It hurt too much to stay.
Inside, everything was exactly where he’d left it.
The skimmer net, hanging on its two hooks. The long blue vacuum hose, coiled perfectly. The tile brushes in a row on a shelf, from biggest to smallest. The chemical testing kit in its plastic case. The leaf rake. The handrail polish. A box of rags, folded.
And on a nail by the door, his faded old clipboard.
Across the top, years ago, in his blocky engineer’s handwriting, he’d written one word.
SATURDAY.
Underneath it was a list. Twenty-three tiny maintenance jobs. Numbered. In order. Every single thing he did, every single week. Skim the surface. Empty the skimmer baskets. Brush the walls. Vacuum. Test the chlorine. Test the pH. Adjust. Backwash the filter. Hose the deck. Wipe down the furniture. Clean the waterfall rocks. Check the pump. Weed the beds. Polish the rails.
I’d seen that clipboard a thousand times. I’d never actually read the whole list.
I sat down on an overturned bucket in the shed and read it slowly, all the way to the bottom.
And at the very bottom, under number twenty-three, there was one more line. Smaller. In pencil instead of pen. Like he’d added it later.
24. Sit down with Abby and enjoy it.
I sat in that shed for a long time.
Then I wiped my eyes, took the clipboard down off its nail, and smiled.
“Looks like Saturday came early this week,” I said.
I spent the rest of that afternoon and most of the next morning laminating signs.
I have a laminating machine. Every retired teacher has a laminating machine. It’s in our blood.
Not fake signs. Not warning signs. Not angry signs.
Real instructions. Chuck’s instructions, copied off his clipboard, one task per card, in big clear letters, with a number at the top of each one.
I numbered every single one.
STEP 1
Skim every leaf and bug from the surface of the pool.
When finished, lift the blue bucket by the shed.
And beneath the blue bucket, another laminated card.
STEP 2
Brush every pool wall, top to bottom, all the way around. Don’t forget the steps.
When complete, check inside the filter cabinet.
And inside the filter cabinet, another card.
STEP 3
Vacuum the entire pool floor. Slowly. Overlap your passes.
When finished, check the chemical cabinet.
And so on.
Each card led to the next. Hidden under a flowerpot. Tucked behind the waterfall rocks. Taped inside the shed door. Rolled up in the skimmer basket. Clipped to Chuck’s clipboard and hung back on its nail.
Twenty-three cards in all.
And a twenty-fourth. Bigger than the others. I laminated it twice.
I propped that one face-down on Chuck’s blue-striped lounge chair.
Then I brought out all the cleaning supplies from the shed and set them up around the yard like stations.
The skimmer net, leaning against the fence. The brush, beside the steps. The vacuum hose, uncoiled on the bricks next to the pool. A bucket of patio cleaner and a sponge. A box of rags. The handrail polish.
I pulled some fresh leaves off the oak tree and scattered them on the surface of the pool. Just a few. Enough to skim.
By Monday evening, my backyard looked exactly like a professional maintenance company had stopped halfway through a big restoration job and gone home for the night.
The final touch was my favorite.
I made one more sign. A big one, on poster board, with stick-on letters.
POOL CLOSED
Maintenance In Progress
I hung it on the outside of the side gate with zip ties.
Then I went inside, made myself a glass of iced tea, put my phone on the kitchen table where I could see the camera app, and waited.
I didn’t have to wait long.
Denise and Brandon came home from her sister’s late Monday night. I heard the SUV in their driveway and Denise’s voice yelling about the mosquitoes at the lake.
Tuesday came and went. Nothing.
Wednesday afternoon was hot. Ninety-two degrees. Sticky.
At exactly 1:18 p.m., my phone buzzed on the kitchen table.
Motion Detected: Side Gate.
I picked up my iced tea and opened the camera app.
There was Denise.
Big floppy sunhat. Striped beach bag over her shoulder. Oversized sunglasses. Flip-flops.
Behind her came Brandon, carrying two towels and a bottle of sunscreen, already in his swim trunks.
They both stopped in front of my gate.
Denise lowered her sunglasses and looked at the sign.
“Huh?” she said.
Brandon frowned. “Pool closed. I guess we can’t.”
Denise waved her hand. Dismissive. Same as always.
“Oh, it’s probably almost finished,” she said. “Look, they left all their stuff.”
She reached over and lifted the latch. The padlock wasn’t on it. I’d left it off on purpose.
The gate swung open.
Brandon pointed at a laminated card zip-tied to the inside of the fence, right at eye level.
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