I stayed quiet when my neighbor took things that didn’t belong to her. I stayed quiet when she “borrowed” my belongings without asking. And I even stayed quiet when she started using my electricity to charge her electric car in the middle of the night.
But the night I finally decided I had tolerated enough, karma struck twice.
The second blow was one she never saw coming.
Most mornings, the biggest decision I had to make was whether my tomatoes needed watering before breakfast.
At sixty-four years old, I liked my life that way.
Simple.
Predictable.
Quiet.
After thirty-two years in the same little suburban house, I had experienced more than enough surprises for one lifetime. My husband and I had built our life there, raised our family, celebrated birthdays, survived arguments, shared quiet Sunday mornings, and eventually grown old together.
After he passed away, the house became quieter.
But I had learned to appreciate that quiet.
I thought there wasn’t much left that could surprise me.
That morning, I found out I was wrong.
I poured myself a cup of coffee, opened the mail, and glanced down at my latest electric bill.
Then I blinked.
I looked at the number again.
I checked the account number.
Then I checked the meter reading.
For a moment, I honestly wondered whether I was looking at somebody else’s bill.
“That can’t be right,” I said aloud.
The cat looked at me from across the kitchen as if I were the one behaving strangely.
The amount was nearly double what I normally paid.
Not a few dollars higher.
Not even twenty or thirty dollars.
Double.
I walked outside to the little electrical box beside my garage and squinted at the meter, as if staring at the numbers long enough might somehow make them apologize and correct themselves.
Nothing changed.
I went back inside and called my daughter, Diane.
That’s what widows do when something doesn’t add up.
We call our daughters and pretend we were just looking for an excuse to talk.
“Mom,” Diane said after I explained the bill, “did you leave the air conditioning running with a window open again?”
“I did not.”
“Are you sure?”
“I haven’t touched the thermostat since April.”
There was a pause.
“Maybe it’s the fridge,” she suggested. “Old fridges eat power.”
I almost laughed.
“The fridge is younger than you are, honey.”
Diane laughed.
I didn’t.
After we hung up, I stood at the kitchen window with my coffee in my hands and stared across the low fence separating my yard from my neighbor’s.
Monica.
She was in her thirties, had three children, and a husband who traveled frequently. She also had a shiny white Tesla that was almost always parked crookedly in her driveway.
The car was usually positioned so close to our shared property line that it looked as if she considered the fence less of a boundary and more of a suggestion.
I had already learned that Monica had trouble understanding where her property ended and everyone else’s began.
