My Neighbor Filled His New Pool From My Garden Spigot And My Water Bill Jumped To $412. When I Caught Him, He Laughed And Said, “Water’s Practically Free.” So I Showed Up To His Pool Party In My Swimsuit

My water bill has been thirty-eight dollars a month, give or take a dollar, for eleven years.

I know because I pay it the day it comes. I’m Maxine Ruddock. I’m seventy-two. I was a payroll clerk for a trucking company for thirty years, and I balance my checkbook to the penny every Sunday night with a cup of decaf and the radio on. When something changes by four dollars, I notice. So when I opened the July bill from the city and saw $412.16, I sat down at the kitchen table and read it three times. Then I put on my glasses and read it again.

Usage: 14,880 gallons. My usual is about 2,000. I live alone. I take short showers. I run the dishwasher twice a week, whether it needs it or not, because my late husband Roscoe used to say a dishwasher that sits gets sulky.

The bill had a little note printed at the bottom: Your usage is significantly higher than normal. You may have a leak.

I called the city first thing the next morning. A tired young woman in billing told me the same thing the note did. “Most likely a leak, ma’am. A running toilet can waste a lot. We can send someone out to check your meter.”

“I’d appreciate that,” I said. “Because unless I’ve been filling a swimming pool in my sleep, I don’t know where fourteen thousand gallons went.”

I didn’t know yet how close to the truth that was.

The Neighbors

The house next door to mine sat empty most of last year after the Pearsons moved to Arizona. In September a couple bought it. Rex and Marisol Novotny. He’s fifty-eight, sells commercial insurance, and has a laugh you can hear from inside a closed car. She’s quieter, a dental hygienist, works long days and has a pretty little garden of tomatoes and peppers she tends in the evenings.

Rex is the kind of man who calls a woman my age “young lady” and expects her to giggle. I don’t giggle. But I’m a good neighbor. I brought them a pound cake when they moved in. Rex ate half of it standing in my doorway and asked if I’d ever thought about selling, because his brother-in-law was looking.

In May a truck delivered a pool. A big round above-ground pool, twenty-four feet across, blue walls, the kind with a metal ladder over the side. Rex put it together himself over two weekends, which he told the whole street about, at length. By Memorial Day it was full and sparkling. I could see the top of it over the chain-link fence between our side yards.

At the block’s Memorial Day cookout at the Ramos house, I heard Rex telling a group of men by the grill, “Filled her up for practically nothing. You just gotta know how.” The men laughed. I didn’t think anything of it. I thought he meant a water truck, or a coupon, or one of those things men like Rex always seem to know about.

The Meter

The city sent a man named Raul Ochoa two days later. He was about forty, polite, with a clipboard and a tablet and very muddy boots.

“Let’s do the easy test first,” he said. “Every faucet in the house off. Toilets not running. Dishwasher off. Washing machine off.”

I went through the house turning things off while he waited by the meter box at the curb. When I came back out, he had the lid up and was crouched over it with a flashlight.

“Ma’am,” he said, “is anything running? Anything at all?”

“Not a drip. I checked every room twice.”

He pointed at the little red dial on the meter. It was turning. Not fast. Just steady, like a second hand.

“That’s water going somewhere,” he said. “Right now. Toilets were my first guess, but this is too steady. This is more like a hose.”

“I don’t have a hose running.”

“Do you have an outdoor spigot?”

I have two. One on the back of the house by my tomato bed, with my old gray hose coiled on a reel. And one on the side of the house, behind the big hydrangeas, by the fence with the Novotnys. Roscoe put that one in in 1994 to wash the car, and I hadn’t touched it since he died.

We walked around the side of the house together. Raul pushed the hydrangea branches aside.

There was a hose on my side spigot. A new green hose, with a shiny brass end, the kind you buy at the hardware store for forty dollars. It wasn’t mine. My hoses are all gray and old and patched with electrical tape.

The spigot was turned on about a quarter turn. The green hose ran along the foundation, tucked behind the hydrangeas where nobody would ever see it, then down along the bottom of the fence and under the chain-link, through a little gap someone had dug out with a trowel. On the other side, it ran across Rex Novotny’s grass, up the blue wall of his swimming pool, and over the edge into the water.

Raul looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at me.

“Well,” he said. “I found your leak.”

Fourteen Thousand Gallons

He did the math right there on his tablet. A pool that size, filled four feet deep, comes to about fourteen thousand gallons. Topping it off after splashing and evaporation, a little more each week.

“That lines up almost exactly with your excess usage,” he said. “And, ma’am, you should know, the sewer charge on your bill is calculated off your water usage. So you didn’t only pay for the water that went into his pool. You paid for it to be treated as sewage too. Even though it never went down your drain.”

“So I paid to fill his pool,” I said, “and then I paid to flush it.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

I stood there in my gardening clogs and looked at that green hose for a while. I want to tell you I was furious. Mostly I felt very tired, the way you do when someone you’ve been polite to turns out to have been laughing at you the whole time. Filled her up for practically nothing. You just gotta know how.

“What are my options?” I asked.

Raul was honest with me, which I appreciated. The city’s leak adjustment program, he said, was for real leaks: broken pipes, bad toilets. Not a neighbor’s hose. For this, the city would call it theft of service. I could file a police report. Or I could take it to small claims court.

“Or,” he said, and glanced over the fence, “you could talk to him. Sometimes that works.”

Over the Fence

I pulled the hose out myself.

I turned off the spigot, unscrewed the green hose from my house, and started pulling it back under the fence, hand over hand, like a woman landing a very long fish. Water dribbled out of the end and soaked my clogs.

That’s when Rex came out his back door in a red polo shirt and flip-flops.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, coming across his yard. “Young lady! What are you doing with my hose?”

I held up the brass end. It dripped onto the grass between us. “I’m returning it,” I said. “It was attached to my house.”

Rex looked at the hose. He looked at Raul, standing behind me in his city shirt with his clipboard. And then he did something I’ll never forget. He laughed.

“Oh, come on, Maxine. That spigot? That’s practically on the property line. I figured it was, you know, shared.”

“It’s on my house, Rex. It’s attached to the brick.”

“Well, nobody was using it.”

“My water bill was four hundred and twelve dollars.”

He made a face like I’d told him the price of a sandwich at the airport. “It’s water. Water’s practically free.”

“Then you won’t mind paying for it,” I said.

He grinned at me through that chain-link fence, the grin of a man who has never once been made to pay for anything he could talk his way out of.

“Take me to court,” he said.

“Rex, I’m holding your hose.”

“So? Anybody could have stuck a hose there,” he said. “Go ahead. Take me to small claims. Or call the cops on your neighbor over a garden hose. See how that looks on the street.”

Raul cleared his throat. “Sir, the meter readings…”

“The meter readings say she used water,” Rex said. “That’s all they say.” He was still smiling. He winked at me. “Tell you what, young lady. You want a swim sometime, you just let me know.”

And he walked back across his grass and into his house.

A Swimsuit

I went inside and sat at my kitchen table with the July bill in front of me and the green hose coiled on the floor by the back door like a sleeping snake.

I thought about calling the police. I really did. But Rex wasn’t wrong about one thing. On our street, the woman who calls the cops on her neighbor over a hose becomes the story, and the hose doesn’t. And I’m seventy-two. I don’t have time to be the crazy lady on Mulberry Street.

I thought about small claims court. The filing fee was seventy-five dollars, and it would take months, and Rex sells insurance. That man has spent his entire life arguing with people about whether things are covered.

Then I looked at my refrigerator. On it, under a magnet shaped like a pineapple, was a bright yellow flyer that had been stuck in every mailbox on the block the week before.

REX & MARISOL’S POOL PARTY! Saturday, July 19, 2 p.m. Bring your suits! Burgers, drinks, cannonball contest! Everyone welcome!

Everyone welcome.

I read it twice. Then I went upstairs and dug in the back of my closet until I found it: a navy one-piece with a little white skirt, which I bought in 2015 for a church trip to the lake and wore exactly once.

It still fit. Mostly.

I called my grandson Nash, who is fifteen and thinks I’m the funniest person he knows, and asked if he wanted to go to a pool party on Saturday.

“Whose?”

“The neighbor’s.”

“The guy with the loud laugh? I thought you didn’t like him.”

“I don’t,” I said. “But I’ve already paid for the water. Seems a shame to waste it.”

Saturday

The party was in full swing by three. Rex had a speaker on the patio playing beach music, and a grill going, and about thirty people in his backyard: neighbors, his insurance buddies, Marisol’s sister and her kids. Children were shrieking in the pool. Ofelia Ramos from across the street waved at me with a hot dog.

I walked over through the front gate in my navy suit with the little skirt, a big straw hat, flip-flops, a beach towel over my shoulder and a tote bag. Nash came behind me carrying a pool noodle and trying very hard not to laugh.

Rex saw me from the grill and his tongs stopped in midair.

“Maxine!” he said, loud enough for the whole yard. “Look at you! You came!”

“You said everyone was welcome,” I said. “And you said if I ever wanted a swim, just let you know. So I’m letting you know.”

A few people laughed, the friendly kind. Rex laughed too, a little uncertainly.

I set my tote bag down on a patio chair, took out a plastic sheet protector, and laid it on the drinks table between the potato salad and a bowl of chips. Inside the sheet protector was my July water bill, with the total circled in red marker. Next to it I had clipped a note card in my best payroll handwriting.

It said: Your pool. My water. 14,880 gallons. $412.16. Enjoy!

Then I climbed up his metal ladder, very carefully, because I’m seventy-two, and lowered myself into fourteen thousand gallons of my own water.

It was lovely. I’ll be honest. The water was warm and clear and smelled like chlorine and sunscreen. I floated on my back with my hat on and looked up at the sky. Nash cannonballed in next to me and won the contest, according to the children.

Behind me, people were gathering at the drinks table. I could hear them reading the card out loud. Someone said, “Wait, is this real?” Someone else said, “Rex, you said you filled it for nothing!”

And then I heard Marisol’s voice, very quiet and very clear.

“Rex. What is this?”

Marisol

I turned around in the water. Marisol Novotny was standing at the drinks table holding my sheet protector in both hands. She’d just come out from the kitchen with a tray of watermelon, and she still had it balanced on one arm.

Rex came over from the grill with his tongs, already talking. “Babe, it’s a joke, she’s being funny, it’s a whole thing about the hose, I’ll explain…”

“What hose?” Marisol said.

Nobody said anything. Thirty people, and the only sound was the speaker playing a steel drum song.

“You told me you got a water truck,” Marisol said. “You told me it cost two hundred dollars. I gave you two hundred dollars for the water truck, Rex.”

Ofelia Ramos put her hot dog down.

Rex’s face went from red to a color I’ve only ever seen on a boiled ham. “Mari,” he said, “can we talk about this inside?”

“No,” said Marisol. She set down the watermelon. She walked over to the edge of the pool, where I was hanging onto the side with one hand and holding my hat on with the other, and she looked down at me.

“Mrs. Ruddock,” she said. “Is this true?”

“Every gallon,” I said. “The city man was there. Raul Ochoa. He has it all on his tablet, if you want his number.”

She stood there for a second. Then she turned around, walked into the house, and came back out with her purse.

The Check

Marisol wrote me a check right there on the drinks table, between the potato salad and the chips, with thirty people watching. She wrote it for $412.16, to the penny. She looked at it, then tore it up and wrote another one for $500.

“For the sewer,” she said. “And the trouble. And the pound cake. I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

“Marisol, that’s too much.”

“It isn’t,” she said, and looked straight at her husband. “He’s paying me back.”

Rex didn’t say anything. He stood there holding his grill tongs like a man who’d forgotten what they were for. One of his insurance buddies patted him on the shoulder and said, “Tough break, buddy,” and then laughed so hard he had to sit down.

I got out of the pool, very carefully, down that metal ladder. I dried off. I folded the check and put it in my tote bag. Then I turned to Rex.

“Thank you for having me,” I said. “The water was perfect. But then, it would be. I picked it out myself.”

The yard went up in laughter. Even Marisol’s sister was laughing. Even, finally, a little bit, Marisol.

Nash and I walked home through the front gate. I made it all the way to my own kitchen before I started laughing too, and I laughed until I had to sit down on the floor in my wet bathing suit, and Nash had to get me a glass of water. From the tap. My tap.

The Lock

On Monday I went to the hardware store and bought a locking spigot cover for twelve dollars and forty-nine cents. It’s a little metal box that fits over the faucet and locks with a key. I put it on Roscoe’s side spigot myself and hung the key on a hook inside my back door.

I also bought a new gray hose. I gave the green one with the brass end back to Rex. I left it coiled neatly on his front porch with a sticky note on it that said Yours, I believe.

The August bill came. Thirty-seven dollars and eighty-one cents. I put it on the refrigerator under the pineapple magnet, where the pool party flyer used to be.

August

Here is my favorite part.

Around the middle of August, after a long hot spell, Rex’s pool started getting low. Evaporation, splashing, a leak in a seam. One evening there was a knock on my front door, and there he stood in his red polo, without the grin for once.

“Maxine,” he said. “I was wondering. The pool’s down about eight inches. I’d pay, of course. Whatever’s fair.”

I looked at him for a while. Then I got my calculator.

I charged him the city water rate, plus the sewer rate, plus twenty percent, which I told him was the convenience fee. It came to sixty-one dollars. He paid me in cash right there on my porch. I unlocked the spigot cover, watched him hook up his own hose, and stood there with my arms folded until the water was exactly where he wanted it. Then I turned off the spigot and locked it again.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” I said.

He laughed, but it wasn’t his big laugh. It was a smaller one. I think it might have been the first honest laugh I’d ever heard out of him.

Tuesdays

Marisol and I are friends now. It turns out we both like crossword puzzles and neither of us likes Rex’s taste in music. On Tuesday evenings, when he’s at his insurance league bowling night, she texts me two words: Pool’s open.

I put on my navy suit with the little skirt and walk next door with my towel. We float around with our hats on and drink iced tea and talk about everything except water bills.

Roscoe would have loved it. He always said there are two ways to get even with a man like Rex: you can fight him, or you can make him laugh at himself in front of his friends. The second way takes longer, he said, but you get to keep your neighbors.

I’d add one thing. Bring a swimsuit. And always read your bill.

If you’ve got a neighbor like Rex, send this to the friend who’d have climbed into that pool with me. And tell me in the comments: what would you have written on that note card?

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