Denise and I never became friends afterward, and perhaps that is why the ending feels more believable to me than some dramatic reconciliation would. Her dog stays out of my flower beds now, my trash cans remain upright on Thursday mornings, nothing disappears from beside my house, and both of us have security cameras pointed toward our respective driveways. Occasionally I see her while I am kneeling among the flowers that started the entire ridiculous conflict. We no longer exchange fake smiles or polite remarks about the weather; we simply acknowledge the boundary between our properties by leaving each other alone. I have come to appreciate that as a perfectly respectable form of peace. Still, whenever I remember Denise pounding on my door in her bathrobe, threatening to destroy me because someone had painted her car less than two weeks after she had secretly done the same thing to mine, I cannot completely suppress a smile. For nearly a year, she had been careful enough to leave me with suspicions but no proof, and I had begun wondering whether I would ever know for certain what was real. In the end, I was not the person who finally exposed her—the one person Denise never expected to investigate her own behavior was her sister.
My Neighbor Painted My Entire Car Pink—The Next Morning, She Pounded on My Door Screaming About Her Own Car
