My neighbor let her dog use my lawn as a toilet every morning for six months and never cleaned up once — I stayed polite until she made one comment I couldn’t forget, and by the next morning I’d taught her a lesson without raising my voice once.

watched me work on it for years.

She moved in two years after we did.

She arrived in a rented truck with an astonishing amount of decorative furniture and a sister who helped unload everything and was rarely seen again.

Marguerite was somewhere in her late fifties, elegant in a deliberate sort of way.

Silver-streaked hair usually pinned neatly back.

Silk blouses.

Carefully chosen jewelry.

She had lived alone long enough to develop very particular opinions about how life around her should operate.

At first, she was a perfectly decent