IN OUR HOME

Dear Spike:

We came home from our vacation just past midnight. Today's your mother and my sixth anniversary, and we were ready to get some rest and then wake up for a relaxing day of pizza, movies and pajamas.

That our back door was unlocked when we returned home from our trip did not concern me. I figured the girl we left to house sit simply forgot to lock up after feeding the cat this afternoon.

Then, I smelled the marijuana.

Within moments, teenagers were popping out of the shadows of our home, stumbling around looking for shoes and coats. They seemed to be in an awful big hurry to get out of our house.

I caught up to one of the girls in our front yard, grabbing her by the collar of her sweater. She promptly slipped out of the shirt and ran off in her bra. Another escaped through a hole in the screen of the bathroom window — a hole that our house sitter had insisted she knew nothing about when we returned from our last vacation.

In the next few minutes, we found all the trappings of a house-sitting sleepover party gone bad. Your mother and I found phones, I-pods, cigarettes, drugs, digital cameras, jackets, pajamas, and — the coup d’état of our investigation — a wallet with identification and a pack of recently-developed photos of the very girls who had been making themselves at home in our home.

I called the police, then went next door to find our house sitter, Stephanie. With a look of utter surprise on her face, she insisted she had nothing to do with the girls in our house. I pointed out that I'd found her phone and wallet right next to an Altoids box full of reefer.

"Oh," she said.

A police officer arrived and, shortly thereafter, several more. (They even brought a bloodhound — must have been a slow night in Salt Lake City!) A few minutes later, one of the officers got a call informing him that some other officers had picked up a girl running around downtown in a bra. Seems she'd called her dad for a ride and he — understandably concerned that his daughter was running around downtown in a bra — had called the police to report that his daughter had been running around downtown in a bra. The cops, having already gotten our call that there was probably a girl running around downtown in a bra, promptly showed up to take her into custody. I'll bet the cops love it when it's this easy.

We spent the rest of the night cleaning up after a party we weren't invited to and taking stock of what had happened. Seems that Stephanie and her friends had used the occasion of our vacation to party at our home, apparently funding their little venture with the $150 I gave her to watch after our home, our garden, our cat and our chickens.

Of course, most of our beer and hard alcohol was gone. Someone had tried the old fill-the-bottle-back-up-with-water trick, but then returned the bottle to the freezer, where it froze (Vodka doesn't do that.) There were a few bottles of wine missing, too, including one of the few from last year's backyard grape harvest.

They also apparently had gotten the munchies. Our freezer had been cleaned out. Most of our fridge and pantry, too. Ice Cream: Gone. Popsicles: Gone. Canned pineapple: Gone. Chile: Gone. Cookies: Gone. Cereal: Gone. They were, however, nice enough to leave us a case of bottled water and some flour tortillas.

They'd sept in our bed, cranked up our air conditioner and watched our movies.

Most of this was forgivable. I knew Stephanie was desperately rebelling from her conservative Mormon upbringing. And had she stolen a bottle or two of liquor or used our basement to hotbox with her friends, I probably would have been mad, but I wouldn't likely have called the cops — or even her parents, for that matter.

Thing was, it seems the money we gave Stephanie, which I had regarded as pretty generous, wasn't enough. She and her friends apparently had augmented her honest earnings with the money from YOUR college savings piggy bank. They also stole the emerald necklace I gave your mom for Mother's Day. And they rifled through our drawers taking God-still-only-knows-what-else.

She'd left the door open for friends to come and go as they pleased, and after a few days, the list of guests at our luxury resort included more people that she didn't know than people that she did.

Worst of all, when I went down to our basement to get my free contact high, I found your baby blanket — the one that your mother had quilted for you when she was pregnant — on the floor next to a spilled bottle of whiskey and three or four used foil roaches.

I nearly cried.

It's nearly 6 a.m. now. After driving home from Oregon all day long, yesterday, I'm still awake. And before I leave the country for a week of work in Cuba, just about 24 hours from now (more on that in Tuesday's letter) I still have to catalog everything that's missing or damaged and change the locks on our doors.

The police are saying they'll likely charge the girls who were in our home with burglary. Stephanie, who had permission to be in our home and thus was not, by definition, a burglar, will likely get rung up as an accomplice to the crime.

She spent the better part of the night apologizing to me, and while I'll likely go to bat for her when it comes time to face the juvenile court judge, I'm not ready to believe she's sincere in her remorse.

Everyone makes mistakes in this life. But if there's one thing you never, ever do, it is this: Do not betray someone's trust.

You might get their forgiveness. You might even get their friendship back.

But you'll never get their trust again.

Never.

Love,
dad