The security camera had been Katie’s suggestion. But the fear I felt while watching the footage belonged entirely to me.
At four in the morning, I sat alone at my kitchen table, gripping my phone with both hands while a grainy black-and-white video played across the screen.
A man was walking slowly up my driveway.
He moved carefully.
Paused.
Looked over his shoulder.
Then crouched beside my old pickup truck.
From inside his jacket, he pulled a hose.
He slipped it into my gas tank as naturally as if he had done it dozens of times before.
Which, as I would soon realize, he probably had.
I watched him siphon the fuel into a red plastic container.
Four minutes later, he replaced the gas cap, wiped his hands, stood up, and walked across the lawn toward the house next door.
I knew that walk.
I had watched it for six years.
Clark.
My neighbor.
I lowered the phone onto the kitchen table.
My coffee was cold.
My hands were trembling.
I told myself it was because the house was chilly.
It wasn’t.
I’m seventy years old.
I’ve buried my parents.
Most of my closest friends.
And three years ago, I buried my wife.
After that much loss, you start believing there are very few things left in the world capable of surprising you.
I was wrong.
My name is Frank.
I live at the end of Maple Court in a quiet suburban neighborhood where people wave while collecting their mail and complain when someone leaves a trash bin out too long.
My wife Ellen and I bought this house forty-one years ago.
We raised our son here.
We argued here.
Made up here.
Celebrated birthdays.
Hosted Christmas dinners.
Grew older.
Ellen died three springs ago.
Since then, the house has always felt one room too large.
I still keep the thermostat at the temperature she preferred.
I still sleep on the left side of the bed.
Some habits survive the people who created them.
Then there’s my truck.
A faded blue 1994 Ford pickup.
Dent in the tailgate.
Small crack near the corner of the windshield.
Nothing impressive.
Anyone driving past would probably assume I still owned it because I couldn’t afford something newer.
They’d be wrong.
That truck was practically part of my marriage.
Ellen and I bought it when our son was still in high school.
We took it to the lake every summer.
Carried lumber in it when we built our deck.
Drove it to the hospital when Ellen’s mother had a stroke.
Then drove home from the funeral three days later without saying a word.
When Ellen became ill near the end, I sometimes took her out in that truck simply because driving made her smile.
She would roll down the window and hold her hand outside in the wind like she was seventeen again.
“This old thing is going to outlive both of us,” she once joked, patting the dashboard.
She was half right.
So when fuel began disappearing from that truck, it bothered me far more than losing twenty dollars’ worth of gasoline should have.
It started on a Tuesday.
Tuesday was always fill-up day.
Old men become creatures of habit.
I filled the tank at the Shell station on Hollis.
Forty-one dollars and some change.
The next afternoon, I drove ten minutes to help my friend Walt repair a section of fence.
Ten minutes there.
Ten minutes home.
Then I barely drove anywhere for the rest of the week.
Thursday.
Friday.
Saturday.
I stayed home.
Read.
Mowed the yard.
Watched baseball.
Sunday morning, I climbed into the truck for church and glanced at the fuel gauge.
Just under half.
I stared.
That made no sense.
I tapped the gauge.
Nothing changed.
My first thought wasn’t theft.
It was memory.
My father became forgetful toward the end of his life.
Ever since turning seventy, I had quietly watched myself for signs.
Missing appointments.
Repeating questions.
Forgetting where I put things.
That morning, sitting behind the wheel, I wondered whether this was the beginning.
Maybe I had driven somewhere and forgotten.
So I let it go.
The following Tuesday, I filled the tank again.
This time, I wrote down every trip.
Pharmacy.
Grocery store.
Home.
That was it.
By Saturday, the tank was almost empty again.
I sat in the driveway with my little notebook and calculated the mileage three times.
Impossible.
I didn’t sleep much that week.
Not because I was afraid of a thief.
Because I was afraid the problem was me.
Finally, I drove the truck to Dave’s Auto.
Dave had repaired our family cars for nearly twenty years.
Big fellow.
Quiet.
Grease permanently embedded in his hands.
“What’s happening, Frank?”
“My gas keeps disappearing.”
He looked at me.
“Disappearing?”
“I fill the tank. Barely drive anywhere. Three or four days later, half of it’s gone. I think I’ve got a leak.”
Dave frowned.
“That much fuel leaking, you’d smell it from your porch.”
“I don’t smell anything.”
“Leave it with me.”
Walt drove me home.
All afternoon, I waited for Dave’s call.
Part of me hoped he’d say the tank was rusted through.
Replacing a fuel tank would cost money.
But money seemed preferable to losing my mind.
Dave called around four.
“Frank, there’s nothing wrong with that truck.”
I gripped the phone.
“No leak?”
“None. Tank’s solid. Lines are good. Connections are good. Honestly, that pickup is in better shape than vehicles twenty years newer.”
I thanked him.
Then stood in my kitchen after the call ended.
If the truck was fine, there were only two possibilities left.
Either my memory was failing.
Or someone was taking my gas.
That was when I remembered Katie.
Katie is my granddaughter.
Twenty-four.
My son’s daughter.
She lives about an hour away and calls me every Sunday whether I answer the first time or not.
She’s the person everyone hands their phones to during family dinners when something stops working.
A few months earlier, she had tried convincing me to install a driveway camera.
“They’re inexpensive now, Grandpa. You’ll get an alert if someone walks near the house.”
I had laughed.
“Who’s coming here? Nobody wants anything I have.”
Now I called her.
“Grandpa?”
She sounded surprised.
I rarely called on weekdays.
“I need one of those cameras.”
There was a pause.
“What happened?”
So I told her.
The missing fuel.
The notebook.
Dave’s inspection.
My fear that maybe I was forgetting things.
Katie listened quietly.
When I finished, she said,
“Grandpa, someone is stealing your gas.”
“You really think so?”
“I’m almost certain.”
She ordered the camera that evening.
Two days later, it arrived.
She talked me through installation over the phone.
At least forty minutes of:
“No, Grandpa, rotate the bracket.”
“This way?”
“The other way.”
Eventually, we aimed the camera directly toward the pickup.
“Now we wait,” she said.
Then her voice became serious.
“And you promise me you won’t go outside in the middle of the night if you catch somebody.”
“I promise.”
The first two nights showed nothing.
A cat.
Branches moving.
Empty pavement.
The third night showed Clark.
And that hurt more than finding a stranger would have.
Clark had lived next door for six years with his wife Denise and their two children.
He was in his mid-forties.
Good job.
New SUV.
Nice watch.
Annual vacations to Florida.
He wasn’t desperate.
Clark was simply cheap.
Not careful-with-money cheap.
The type of cheap that gradually becomes a personality.
I had learned that over the years.
He once borrowed my extension ladder.
Three months later, I had to ask for it back.
He looked irritated that I wanted my own property.
Then came my pressure washer.
My chainsaw.
Wheelbarrow.
Socket set.
Two sockets disappeared.
Ellen had always encouraged me not to fight about it.
“Let it go, Frank. It isn’t worth ruining peace between neighbors.”
So I let things go.
Even after she died.
Partly because keeping peace had been important to her.
But gas was different.
Clark wasn’t borrowing anything.
He was sneaking onto my property in darkness and stealing from me.
Then carefully replacing the cap so I wouldn’t notice.
What bothered me wasn’t the price.
Maybe fifteen or twenty dollars each week.
I could afford that.
What bothered me was what the act said.
Clark had looked at an old widower with an old truck and decided I was someone he could take from.
Quiet.
Alone.
Too old to notice.
Or too weak to object.
I replayed the video.
Watched him replace the cap.
And something inside me that had been asleep since Ellen died began waking up.
I should have called Katie.
Instead, I pulled on my shoes and walked straight across the lawn.
It was around seven.
Clark answered his door holding toast.
The second he saw me, something flashed across his face.
He knew.
Then he smiled.
“Frank! You’re up early.”
I didn’t return the smile.
“Have you been stealing gasoline from my truck?”
His expression changed.
“I have camera footage, Clark. You walked onto my driveway at two in the morning with a hose.”
For a moment, he said nothing.
Then he laughed.
Actually laughed.
“Oh, come on, Frank.”
My jaw tightened.
“So you admit it?”
“I take a little.”
“A little?”
“Gas prices are ridiculous.”
He leaned against the doorway.
“And honestly, you’re retired. You hardly drive anywhere. I have work. Kids. School runs. You’re letting that fuel sit there while I actually need it.”
I stared at him.
“It belongs to me.”
Clark rolled his eyes.
“You’re being greedy.”
That sentence almost impressed me.
He was stealing fuel from a seventy-year-old widower and somehow I was selfish.
“It’s a couple gallons,” he continued. “We’re neighbors. Neighbors share.”
“Sharing requires asking.”
“Would you have said yes?”
“No.”
Clark shrugged.
“There you go.”
Then he looked over his shoulder.
“I’ve got to get my kids to school. We’ll talk later.”
He closed the door.
In my face.
I stood on his porch.
Through the door, I heard one of his children ask,
“Who was that?”
Clark answered,
“Just the neighbor being weird.”
Just the neighbor.
Nobody important.
I walked home.
Made another pot of coffee.
And sat at my kitchen table.
I considered calling the police.
Technically, I had everything needed.
Video.
Timestamp.
Clear face.
Repeated theft.
But then I pictured what came next.
Police knock on Clark’s door.
He gets a warning.
Maybe a fine.
Then for the next ten years, I live beside a man telling the neighborhood some unstable old widower called the police because of “a little gas.”
Clark would make himself the victim.
People like Clark are very talented at that.
I didn’t want to hurt him.
I didn’t want to damage his vehicle.
I didn’t want to create anything dangerous.
I simply wanted one thing.
I wanted Clark to feel what it was like to be exposed.
So I finally called Katie.
When I finished telling her about the confrontation, she went quiet.
“He called you greedy?”
“Yes.”
“And shut the door in your face?”
“Yes.”
Another pause.
“Okay.”
The way she said it made her sound like a military commander.
“We’re going to handle this differently.”
She came Saturday morning.
We sat at my kitchen table with coffee and a notebook.
“First,” she said, “we save everything.”
She downloaded the footage.
Then discovered the camera had recorded Clark on three separate nights.
Three dates.
Three clips.
Three trips across my lawn with his red gas container.
She backed everything up.
“Airtight,” she said.
Then she installed a second small camera facing Clark’s porch.
“For later.”
I raised an eyebrow.
She smiled.
That afternoon, we prepared our surprise.
Ellen had loved making homemade holiday decorations and dyes.
Some of her old supplies were still stored in the garage.
Among them was a very strong blue coloring concentrate.
There was also an old novelty stink spray my son had once given me as a joke.
Completely harmless.
Absolutely horrible smelling.
Katie and I packed both into an ordinary gift box protected by a plastic liner.
Inside, I placed a note.
THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN TAKING FROM ME EVERY NIGHT.
NOW EVERYONE KNOWS.
— YOUR GREEDY NEIGHBOR, FRANK.
Attached were three photographs.
Clark beside my truck.
Clark siphoning gasoline.
Clark carrying the red container home.
We wrapped everything in cheerful paper and put a bow on top.
“Grandpa,” Katie said, staring at the finished package, “Grandma would think this was ridiculous.”
“She’d tell me to forgive him.”
Katie grinned.
“And secretly love every second.”
We waited.
Two nights later, the driveway camera sent an alert shortly after two in the morning.
I stood beside my bedroom window.
There he was.
Clark.
Again.
Hose into my tank.
Red container filling.
I could have shouted.
Instead, I watched.
This time I wasn’t angry.
Because I knew something he didn’t.
