That summer, the quantities changed. Doug's note began to mention the chlorine level dropping faster between visits. He began to add a second jug of shock treatment where one had been enough. The skimmer basket, which used to hold a few leaves and the occasional insect, began to fill with sunscreen film and hair ties and the small debris of many bodies rather than one. Doug did not complain. He was not the complaining type. He wrote, in his plain handwriting: "Heavy use this week. Filter running longer."
I compared the invoices at the kitchen table one evening, spreading them out in two rows: last summer and this summer. The difference was not subtle once I laid it out. The chemical charges were higher, month over month, and the water treatments were more frequent. I added the columns twice, because that is what I do when a total surprises me, and both times I got the same answer. I was paying more to maintain a pool I was using less, because I was timing my own swims around Sandra's laps and Sandra's afternoons and Sandra's cooler.
The water told the same story. Twice that summer, the pool went cloudy in a way it had not gone cloudy before. The first time, I assumed it was heat. The second time, Doug tested the water while I stood beside him, and he showed me the reading on his kit without making a speech about it.
"More bodies, more lotion, more load on the filter," he said. "It will clear with treatment, but it will come back if the use stays at this level."
He did not say whose bodies. He did not need to. I was one person, swimming a few times a week. The load on the filter was not mine.
The coping showed it too. The coping stones around the shallow end, where children climbed out again and again, had small chips along the edge that had not been there in the spring. The ladder treads were looser than they had been. The deck chairs, which I kept aligned in a neat row, were constantly rearranged into a loose circle, as if the deck belonged to a group rather than a household of one. I realigned them each evening, and each morning they had migrated again, or stayed where they had been left, which amounted to the same thing.
I kept the invoices in a folder by year, and the folder itself told the story before I added a single column. Last summer's folder was thin. This summer's was thicker, with extra treatment slips paper-clipped to Doug's receipts. I did not need a spreadsheet to see the direction; I needed one only to prove it to myself. None of this was, by itself, a crisis. A chipped coping stone can be repaired. Cloudy water can be treated. A higher chemical bill can be paid. I paid all of it, because the invoices were in my name and the pool was at 14 Cloverfield Road, and there was no one else to send them to. Sandra never offered to contribute. She never asked what the chemicals cost. She thanked me for the pool the way you thank someone for a view: as if it were a natural feature, not a thing someone bought and maintained.
That was the month I stopped thinking of the problem as a social awkwardness and started thinking of it as an account. An account has entries. It has a payer and a user. When the payer and the user are different people, and the user does not acknowledge the difference, the account does not balance. I could feel the imbalance every time I filed Doug's receipt. I was not yet ready to say so out loud. But I had begun, privately, to add up what silence was costing me, and the total was no longer small enough to ignore.
I had the debate with myself at the kitchen table, late in the evening, with Doug's invoices in a neat stack on my left and a blank sheet of paper on my right.
The question was simple to state and difficult to answer: should I confront Sandra, or should I keep a record?
Confrontation had an obvious appeal. I could walk next door, knock on the door at 16 Cloverfield Road, and say the sentences I had rehearsed in my head a dozen times: the permission was weekends only, when I was home, household only, no guests, no code for regular use. I could say the arrangement had expanded beyond what I had offered, and that I needed it to return to its original terms. It would be honest. It would be direct. It would also, I knew, become a story the moment I said it. Sandra was a paralegal. She knew how to reframe a conversation. She would be warm, and reasonable, and sorry in a way that conceded nothing, and by the end of the conversation I would have the feeling of having been heard without having changed anything.