There was a swimming pool at the end of the street, and for a while it was the best thing in the world. A neighbor family in a post-war blue-collar suburb on the Jersey side of the Delaware — a suburb built for the men who'd worked the Philadelphia Navy Yard — had a huge in-ground pool that took up their entire backyard, and they let every kid in the neighborhood use it. Come whenever, in or out of the family, as long as you closed the gate and hauled out your own trash. No supervision required, no questions asked. For a kid, it was about as good as life got.
A man who never swam
The dad wasn't around much. He worked a union job in the mailroom of the Philadelphia Inquirer — the paper's paper of record — and when he did come home, he'd push through the wooden gate in his work clothes and just stand there watching the kids splash around. He never got in the water himself. Not once, in all those summers. He'd say something small and harmless — "good day to be in the water!", kid's having fun — and that would be it. He was quiet. Mild-mannered, mostly. A hard worker who'd put in twenty-eight years at the paper without a single red flag. His wife worked too, as the head waitress at a 24-hour diner between Philly and Atlantic City — she was, in fact, the person who got the narrator her very first restaurant job, the one that helped pay for college. The narrator babysat the couple's first grandchild for a year. She was around this family constantly. And she never really knew any of them at all.
Something about their house never sat right, even though it had the same floor plan as her own grandparents' place a few doors down. The blinds were always shut, the curtains always drawn, the air inside heavy in a way the sunny, treeless pool never was. She babysat that baby for a year and never once stayed in their house overnight — always at her grandparents' instead. She couldn't say exactly why. Just a feeling.
The night he went berserk
Then, one unbearably sticky August afternoon — years before the babysitting, when she was still a kid herself — the quiet dad went to work the night shift and, at around one in the morning, he snapped. The papers used the word "berserk." He stabbed a coworker to death in the mailroom with a pocket knife and wounded two others. He was the supervisor, not a rank-and-file worker with a grievance, and no one could quite explain what the working-conditions dispute even was. He fled covered in blood. There was a manhunt across Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. It didn't last long — he turned himself in wearing a clean shirt, with a lawyer at his side.
The painter he killed
The man he killed was forty-four, childless, and — in a detail that didn't surface until decades later, when the narrator finally tracked down the archived coverage behind paywalls and old microfiche — a painter. His neighbors called his paintings Disney-like. His great joy, by all accounts, was giving them away to kids on his street. Two men, in wildly different ways, had each spent their off-hours being generous to the neighborhood's children. Only one of them lived to keep doing it.
The man who died in that mailroom stabbing spent his off-hours giving away paintings he'd made himself to kids on his street — the same quiet role the man who killed him had, in his own way, played at the pool for years. Two men, both devoted to the neighborhood's children in wildly different ways, and only one of them lived to keep doing it.
Three to five years
What happened in court was, in its own way, just as strange as the killing. The judge sentenced the mailroom supervisor to three to fifteen years — three to five for the murder itself, the rest served concurrently for the two woundings — and, in open court, urged the widow of the man he'd killed to forgive him, telling the defendant that he was "not a criminal type" and that the violence had been "caused by an outburst that should not have ever happened." The Inquirer fired him immediately. The courts, the press, the community — by the narrator's reading of the old clippings, all of it showed him a gentleness that still doesn't sit easily decades later.
What we did with it
Life did what it does. The family sold the house; a new family moved in and used the pool, though the old neighborhood kids never went back. Every so often someone would bring up "Mr. So-and-so" who "stabbed those guys at the Enquirer," and somebody would say it's always the quiet ones, and everyone would laugh — and then remember that the quiet one wasn't a stranger from the news. He was the guy who used to say "good day to be in the water!"
He's still alive, older now, presumably frail. His wife has died. The narrator, working from names, dates and an address she still has memorized, found his current house on Google Earth and thought about it for a long time before deciding to leave his name out of this story. Some sleeping dogs, she figured, could stay asleep — at least for now.