* * *
Darlene's camera went up the next weekend.
It was a white bullet camera, a good one, the kind with a little spotlight and a speaker, and she had Rick mount it on the corner post of their deck. It wasn't pointed at their own yard. It wasn't pointed at the greenbelt either, not really. It was angled down and to the left, straight into my backyard, at my kenaf beds and my patio and my sliding glass door, with a wedge of my front yard visible past the corner of my garage. At night a small red light glowed beside the lens.
I went up to her front door that Sunday afternoon. I'd been working myself up to it for an hour. Darlene answered with Duchess yapping under one arm.
"Darlene," I said, "your new camera is pointed directly into my yard."
"It's pointed at the common area," she said. "For security. There's been activity."
"What kind of activity?"
"I'm not able to discuss an ongoing matter," she said. It was a phrase I would hear her use many times over the next two months. It has a particular sound coming from the only person treating the matter as ongoing.
"It can see into my kitchen."
"Then you might want to close your blinds," Darlene said, and shut the door.
Through the front window, as I turned to go, I saw Rick in the living room with the TV remote in his hand. He was looking at me. He lifted two fingers off the remote, his little wave, and his face had the expression of a man in the passenger seat of a car that is going much too fast. Then he turned back to the golf.
That evening I closed my blinds for the first time since I'd moved in. I stood in my dim kitchen with my hands on the counter and felt, for a few minutes, the specific humiliation of being made to feel like a criminal in your own house. Then I opened the blinds again, all the way, and made dinner in full view. If she wanted footage, she could have footage of me eating pad thai standing up.