The basement smelled like wet concrete and old cardboard.
I carried the wet vacuum down the stairs with Lucas trailing behind me, the towels he'd laid along the basement door already dark at the edges. Water had seeped under them in a thin, insistent line. It pooled around the legs of the storage shelves and spread toward the boxes I'd stacked along the far wall.
"Start with the boxes," I told him. "Anything on the floor, move it to the top shelves. Work fast and don't drop anything."
He nodded and waded in. The water was only an inch deep, but an inch was enough to ruin photo albums, school records, the box of my wife's things I'd never been able to sort through. My wife died four years ago, and some boxes I just moved from apartment to apartment without opening. Now I was carrying them upstairs two at a time while my son stacked them on the kitchen table.
The window well outside was the worst of it. I could see it through the basement window, a rectangle of rising water with grass and mulch floating on the surface. Every few minutes another slosh came over the edge and added to what was already inside.
I dragged the wet vacuum across the floor and started sucking up what I could. The machine roared and filled its tank in minutes. I lugged it upstairs, dumped it in the driveway, and went back down. Again. Again.
Lucas worked without complaining. His jaw was tight in a way that worried me, that set, adult way thirteen-year-olds get when they're trying not to panic.
"Dad," he said, lifting a box of his old comic books. "The roses are gone."
"What?"
"The flower beds by the fence. They're just mud now."
Three beds. I'd planted them the first spring after we moved in, my wife's favorites β daylilies, coneflowers, black-eyed Susans. Lucas had helped me dig the holes. Now they were a brown slurry running toward the street.
I kept vacuuming.
Around 8:03, my phone rang. I was on my knees by the basement door, wringing out a towel, and the sound startled me so badly I nearly dropped it.
The caller ID said City Water Compliance Office.
"Mr. Dalton?" a woman asked.
"Yes."
"My name is Susan Barrett. We received an emergency complaint concerning an irrigation rupture at your address."
I looked up through the basement window. Across the street, Grace Hollis stood near her mailbox holding a red folder against her chest.
"She called you."
"The complaint states that an illegal high-pressure sprinkler damaged neighboring property."
"She broke the sprinkler with a hammer."
There was a short silence on the line.
"Did you witness that?"
"My security camera did."
"I'm on my way."
The call ended. I stood in the shallow water with the phone in my hand and watched Grace walk back toward her house. She'd filed the complaint less than an hour after destroying my yard. She hadn't even waited for the ground to dry.
By nine o'clock, the water had stopped spreading. The channel I'd cut kept it moving toward the drain. The window well was still full, but it wasn't rising anymore.
Lucas and I carried the last of the boxes up. He sat on the basement steps with wet socks and looked at the ruined floor.
"Three flower beds are destroyed," I said, mostly to myself. "The crawl space under the dining room is wet. The insulation by the side wall is soaked. But the structure's fine. We saved the basement."
"What if the foundation's cracked somewhere we can't see?"
"Then we hire someone to look."
"What if she does something else?"
I sat down beside him on the steps. The wet vacuum hummed in the corner, its tank full again.
"For six months she's filed complaints," I said. "The drainage specialist, the city measurements, the installer certifications. None of them stuck. Today she changed tactics."
"She flooded our yard."
"Yes."
"And then she called the city on us."
"Yes."
He was quiet for a moment. "That's insane."
"That's the plan."
"What plan?"
I didn't have an answer for that yet. Not the whole answer. But I was starting to see the shape of it, the way you see the shape of something moving under a blanket.
"She wants us to leave," I said.
"Why?"
"So she can have this land too."
"She already has a house."
"She wants this one. Or she wants it gone." I stood up and grabbed the vacuum tank. "Come on. We need to get the mud off the driveway before it dries into concrete."
We worked outside for the rest of the morning. The neighbors across the street watched from their porch. The Whitfields β Daniel and Nora β stood there with their arms crossed, and I could feel their eyes on me.
At 11:47, a white municipal vehicle pulled up to the curb.
Grace got out of the passenger side. Behind the inspector came two HOA board members and the Whitfields, and Grace was carrying her red folder like a weapon.