Dear Debbie Summary & ending explained

Dear Debbie, my husband won't let me touch the car radio. Not even the volume. What do I do?

The answer I'll send the paper is sweet and sensible: talk to him, pick a calm moment, take turns. The answer I type first, the one that stays in a folder nobody opens, involves his eardrums and a man who sleeps very deeply. I never send that one. I never delete it either.

It's seven in the morning in Hingham, Massachusetts. Today a garden magazine is sending a photographer to shoot my roses. I've saved a bottle of good wine for tonight.

Izzy comes down with red eyes. She's been cut from the soccer team. She's fast, she's good, and Coach Pike has decided she isn't good enough.

"Please don't call him, Mom," she says. "Promise."

I promise. I don't say I won't look into it.

On the way to the car, my neighbor Brett is waiting at the hedge. Somebody cut the power to his home office yesterday, right in the middle of his music, the music he plays loud enough to rattle my windows.

"I know it was you," he says.

"Brett. I'm a mom with a vegetable patch." I smile. I keep smiling until he walks away. The box cutter in my gardening apron stays exactly where it is.

At ten, the magazine calls. The photographer won't be coming. They've decided to feature another garden on the street instead. Jo Dolan's.

I walk over. Jo is on her porch, arranging her hydrangeas for the camera, and she doesn't even pretend to be sorry.

"Your garden's lovely, Debbie. It's just a bit… homemade."

Something starts to buzz inside my skull, a low electric hum I've felt before. I take a breath.

"You know what I believe in, Jo? Karma."

That night I go to open my wine. Someone has drunk it and filled the bottle with water. I know who: Zane, my older daughter's boyfriend, who empties our fridge like it's his.

I am very calm.

I have an IQ of 178. I left MIT a long time ago, and I've never told anyone the real reason. People here think I'm a housewife with a little column.

They have no idea what I'm capable of.