My Neighbor's Teenager Started a Band. In the Garage. Under My Bedroom.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they react to bad garage-band drumming at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday. Me, I reacted like a coward. I turned up my television and told myself teenagers deserve hobbies. My wife reacted like a general. Within a week she had a spreadsheet of decibel readings, a printout of the town noise ordinance, and a look in her eye I had last seen during our wedding seating negotiations.

The band belonged to Cody Marsh, fifteen, who lived directly across from us and possessed a drum kit that his father, Dale, had bought him for reasons the entire street would come to question. The band had four members, one song, and no discernible key. They practiced that one song the way water practices erosion -- endlessly, patiently, wearing the neighborhood down molecule by molecule.

We tried everything short of arson. We asked nicely. Dale said boys will be boys and that music was better than drugs, a false binary if I ever heard one, since the two are famously compatible. We asked the other neighbors to complain in a coordinated way, and they agreed enthusiastically and then did nothing, because that is how neighborhoods work. My wife filed a formal noise complaint. A patrol car came, the officer nodded along to the one song for a minute like he could not help it, and then left. The drumming resumed at dawn.

And then the noise stopped mattering, because of what came out about Dale.

It arrived the way these things always do, sideways, at a barbecue. Dale, it turned out, had bought Cody that drum kit and that garage sound system and that new truck in the driveway with money he did not exactly have in any legal sense. He worked at a title company. He had been, for something like two years, quietly moving client escrow funds through accounts that were not supposed to hold them. The drums, someone said, had been bought the same month a very large deposit went somewhere it should not have gone. Dale was generous that spring. Suspiciously, retrospectively generous. He paid for a neighbor's new roof. Boys will be boys, and apparently so will embezzlers.