"I know you wouldn't shut a tap unless there was a reason, but my husband can't carry water upstairs anymore. What are we supposed to do?" I told her I would bring drinking water in the morning and asked whether she had relatives nearby. When she said no, I wrote her address on the back of my own copy with a star beside it.
Not every door brought an argument. A little boy in dinosaur pajamas asked if the water was sick. His mother gently moved him behind her and asked whether he could still take a bath. I told her not to use the system water until the advisory was lifted and offered the name of a county contact who could give more specific guidance. A retired nurse offered to organize bottled water for the residents on her street if someone could bring a supply. A young couple put spare cases from their garage on a table outside their house before we had finished explaining why we were there.
At one in the morning, after the last flyer was delivered, I drove to a wholesale club nearly forty minutes away. Anna came along because I had been awake since before dawn and she did not trust me to carry what needed carrying. We put two pallets of bottled water on our credit card with a request that the store arrange loading assistance. The receipt was long enough to fold into quarters, and Anna slipped it into the compartment of her purse where she kept every purchase she intended to worry about later.
We unloaded what we could at the community gate, with help from a warehouse driver who had seen our truck backing in and understood the situation from one look at the stacked water. The rest stayed on pallets where residents could reach it. I wrote FREE WATER, TAKE WHAT YOU NEED on a piece of cardboard and taped the emergency advisory beside it. I did not put the Wilson name on the sign. I knew enough by then not to think people needed an invitation to turn a water pickup into another argument about me.
By six in the morning both pallets were gone. Anna and I drove past the gate on our way home and saw the flattened cardboard, several empty shrink-wrap sheets, and nothing else. I hoped the cases had gone to people who needed them rather than the first four families who arrived with big enough vehicles. Then I stopped myself. In a crisis, people take what they can because they are scared. It was my job to keep them informed, not decide whether their fear was deserved.
At eight o'clock Diane posted her statement. It was written in measured sentences with no insults, no capitals, and no exclamation marks, which made it far more persuasive than her shouting at the valve had been. She described the outage as an unnecessary service interruption occurring amid a long-running billing dispute. Then she attached a photograph of my accounts receivable ledger, cropped so that the line for Cedar Hollow filled the screen: twenty-six months unpaid, fifty-five thousand nine hundred dollars owed.