At the Hendersons' home, Frank Henderson opened the door in a bathrobe. I'd helped him locate a leak three winters earlier. We'd eaten barbecue together at the county fair. Now he looked at the page in my hand and then at me as though I were a stranger.
"This you?" he asked. "This whole thing?"
"I found a condition that could make the water unsafe. Please don't use what's in the pipes."
"My wife says you were out here this morning. Why didn't you fix it then?"
"Because I didn't know what it was then. I still don't know where it's getting in."
"You always know everything about that tower when we get a bill."
He wasn't being fair, and he was frightened for his family, and both things could be true. I handed him the warning. "I'm working on it, Frank. I promise you that."
He closed the door without answering.
At one in the morning we were nearly finished. My shoulders ached and the cold had worked through my shirt. Elaine sat silently in the truck, holding the checklist. At the final house she put a mark beside the address, and for a moment neither of us moved. The only light came from a streetlamp reflecting off wet leaves beside the road.
"We need bottled water," she said.
"The stores are closed."
"The warehouse club out on Route Eight is open for overnight commercial pickup. You have the account."
I looked at her. "That's a lot of water."
"Yes," she said. "There are a lot of people."
So I drove forty minutes to a wholesale loading dock where a tired employee in a blue vest helped me calculate how much my trailer could safely carry. I paid for two pallets of bottled water on our family card, secured them with ratchet straps, and drove back through empty roads while sunrise slowly bleached the eastern sky. We unloaded at the neighborhood gate. Elaine wrote FREE WATER — TAKE WHAT YOU NEED on a sheet of cardboard, and I taped it to the stack.
A resident stopped before I'd finished cutting the straps. Then another. By six the pallets were gone. Some families took only enough for breakfast. Others loaded entire cases into SUVs. I couldn't control that part. I could only provide what I could afford and trust that enough would reach the people who needed it.
At seven-thirty I fell asleep on the couch with my boots still on. Twenty minutes later my telephone vibrated so hard against the coffee table that I woke thinking the pressure alarm was going off.
Diane had posted to the neighborhood app.
Her statement was long, calm, and formatted like a professional announcement. It expressed concern for the children and elderly. It said the outage was not the result of an officially declared emergency. It described a longstanding billing dispute between the Wilson family and Cedar Hollow Estates. Then it offered what she called "background documentation" in the form of a photograph of the service ledger.