I leaned down to his open window, looked directly at him, and said, calm and even: Rick, two years ago, when your basement flooded at two in the morning, whose sump pump did you borrow to save your furnace. Whose driveway did you run across in the rain.
The grin faded into confusion, and then into something like memory.
I had not planned to bring it up. But two years of being called the angry guy, by the very man whose home I had helped save, had finally worn through my patience, and it came out of me quietly, standing there in the morning cold.
Two winters back, Rick’s basement had flooded in the middle of the night, and it was me he had banged on the door for, me who had lent him my pump and my extension cords and stood in his flooding basement until dawn helping him save the furnace he could not afford to replace, and he had thanked me then like I was the best neighbor on earth.
And somewhere in the two years since, he had forgotten. He had rewritten me from the neighbor who saved his furnace into the difficult guy who complained about parking. It is easier to mistreat a difficult man than a man who once helped you at two in the morning, so he had quietly changed the story in his own head.
I reminded him. Not cruelly. Just plainly. I said: I did not help you that night so you would owe me. I helped you because that is what neighbors do. But I would think a man who remembered that night would not spend two years making me late for work and calling me difficult for objecting.
Rick was quiet for a long moment. The grin was entirely gone. He said, slowly, that he had forgotten, and that he was ashamed he had forgotten.
He moved the truck. And then he sat in his own driveway with his head in his hands for a minute before he came over and shook my hand and apologized, really apologized, for two years of taking a good neighbor for granted.
It turned out Rick was not a cruel man. He was a forgetful, self-absorbed one, who had let the memory of a kindness fade because remembering it made his own behavior harder to justify. Reminded of who I had been to him, he could not keep pretending I was someone else.
We are good now. Better than good. The next time it rained hard, he was on my doorstep at midnight, not to borrow a pump, but to help me clear my own gutters before the storm. My driveway has been clear ever since. Some neighbors you have to fight. Some you just have to remind. Rick, it turned out, only needed reminding.