With the photograph facing the street.
Around five o’clock, I heard him from inside my kitchen.
“WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?”
Apparently, he’d found it.
I walked outside.
So did several other neighbors.
Clark stood on his porch holding the enlarged picture.
His face was bright red.
“You think this is funny?”
“No.”
I folded my arms.
“I think asking privately didn’t work.”
He opened the box.
The first few neighbors probably assumed it was only about the gasoline.
Then Mrs. Delgado walked over from across the street and glanced at my list.
Her forehead wrinkled.
“Pressure washer?”
“He borrowed mine.”
She looked at me.
Then at Clark.
“But he borrowed mine too.”
That sentence changed everything.
Clark spun toward her.
“Yours wasn’t working right.”
“It was working perfectly when I gave it to you.”
Before Clark could answer, Tom walked over.
He looked at the list.
“Ladder?”
Then he glanced toward Clark’s garage.
“Wait a second.”
Everybody followed his eyes.
A yellow ladder was leaning against the garage wall.
Tom pointed.
“That’s my ladder.”
Clark threw both hands into the air.
“I was going to return it.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
Mrs. Delgado suddenly pointed toward another object.
“Is that my extension cord?”
Clark looked toward the garage.
That was his mistake.
Because once everybody started looking, everybody started remembering.
One neighbor had loaned him a hedge trimmer.
Another was missing a socket wrench.
Someone else had given Clark a folding table for a child’s birthday party eight months earlier.
One story became three.
Then five.
Then more.
Every one sounded almost identical.
Clark had asked politely.
They’d agreed.
He’d promised to return the item.
Then weeks or months had passed.
Whenever someone asked for it, there was always an excuse.
Tomorrow.
This weekend.
Soon.
Didn’t you say I could keep it a little longer?
Do you actually need it today?
For years, we’d all treated those experiences as individual annoyances.
Nobody had compared notes.
Until that afternoon.
I looked around at my neighbors and realized that Clark hadn’t just been taking advantage of me.
He had been taking advantage of everyone separately, relying on the fact that none of us considered the problem important enough to discuss.
Now everybody was discussing it.
At once.
And Clark knew he was losing control.
“This is ridiculous,” he snapped. “Everybody borrows things.”
