When good intentions backfire, sometimes it leaves you a smidge paranoid the next time around.
During my first marriage a long time ago in another chapter of another book of my life, I lived in a triplex. A couple and their baby moved in the apartment above us, and they befriended us instantly.
The husband was well spoken; his posture and mannerisms screamed “Prep School Grad”. She was … well … not. She was clearly born on the opposite side of the tracks from him, and she didn’t even possess all of her teeth. She had a tendency to misspeak, and to dress and behave inappropriately—like wear revealing clothing and brushing up against my husband.
This couple was so mismatched, we speculated that perhaps he married her because he got her pregnant. We later learned we were right. But that part didn’t matter. Their history was irrelevant in the here and now. They were friendly and personable and liked us. Since I assume no one will like me before they even meet me, when they do show fondness towards me, it comes as a surprise and shock and they’d have to do something terrible for me not to reciprocate.
Soon, however, we began to sense something amiss. The four of us were slowly evolving to just the three of us. We were seeing less of the husband. I felt as if he were in the role of someone hired to find a home for a stray and her litter. His job was done.
Her neediness made us pause. She didn’t work and would latch onto anyone who was home during the day. My husband had weekends off; I had Sunday and Monday. Her husband was gone every day. What he did every day remains a mystery. So she unwittingly became ours, invaded our lives. Every time I turned around, she was there. She was always asking for something, and we were always giving it to her. Either that or she’d help herself to whatever we weren’t offering.
She’d call my husband and ask for assistance in moving furniture around or for minor repairs. She’d flirt a little or a lot, he’d tell me later. Later we would find out she was only sixteen and a high school dropout. Her husband, twenty-three and a university graduate. We would also find out later they were both con artists. Her job title was Statutory Rape Blackmail. His was Lawsuits.
They didn’t just wait for opportunity to knock, either. They made it happen. And we learned of it before they had a chance to strike. We were their next target; our only crime was in our good intentions. And they weren’t happy to know we were on to them. They made out lives miserable for a while.
Even while all this was happening, I was writing the story in my head, filling in the blanks. My novel (the one I haven’t written yet) will someday reveal the mystery of their pairing, his and her upbringings, and all the whys of it, the wheres, and the what happened next.
Then I made a mental movie of it. I can’t put you into my head so let’s use Pacific Heights‘ yuppie horror film tagline: “It seemed like the perfect house. He seemed like the perfect tenant. Until they asked him to leave.” 
Mine will be like this: “She likes anyone who likes her. He will help anyone who asks. They meet the couple. They seemed like perfect friends. Until they weren’t.”
Being the imaginative person that I am, I, coincidently, use the same actors. The con husband sort of looked like Michael Keaton, and my husband sort of looked like Matthew Modine. Melanie Griffith looked more like the slut in my story, so I assigned her that role. Angelina Jolie will play me of course. (stop laughing.) I might have a hard time erasing years off their looks enough to play sixteen to twenty-three-year-olds—details I’m still working out..
That was one of my more vivid memories of good-deed-gone-bad. There have been other times my good intentions backfired. But each time now that I perform a neighborly service, do a good deed, or befriend a new person, my suspicious mind triggers a story, an outcome with tragic consequences. I can’t help it; it just happens.
A few years ago, I found myself watering an Australian tree fern at a vacant, foreclosed house in my neighborhood. I was paranoid each time I crossed the grass and turned on the hose that somehow the house became occupied overnight and I would be arrested for trespassing or shot. My mind works that way. And I wrote a story about it titled Tree Hugger, published at The Earth Comes First. 
Do you have any tales of good deeds gone wrong?
Tricia
Um WOW. How awful!
I don’t have any stories about good intentions going wrong… Although I know it’s happened a couple of times, but never with a scandalous outcome like this one!
I’ll bet your autobiography would sell REALLY well.
leafprobably~I’d have to sell it as fiction since I have to make up stories to keep it real. Like how this couple found each other. In my head, she set him up not even knowing he was a con about to be conned. Mismatched, yet made for each other, that’s my version.
Seriously, you’re writing this book, right? It’s going to start talking to you and then you’ll HAVE to get your current book done and out of the way so you can concentrate on this new story.
Linda~It’s been talking to me for 20+ years. If anything urges me to finish my current book, it’s my desire never to look at it again.
Creepy story, and you never get back the innocence that almost made you a victim. Write it out of you, I would. Get paid at least for having that innocence stolen. I was nice once to a lab technician, an older chap, where I was an undergrad and he stalked me for weeks, cycling past my car and stroking it, leaving roses for me, and hanging about behind me when I was working in the lab. The up side was, it gave me the (immature) opportunity to go running to a bloke I fancied to get him to put a stop to it. He did but he was onto me & I got no further, darn it!
Suzanne~Just who strokes a car? Ewww. That in itself is creepy. Too bad you didn’t get a Hollywood ending with your hero. Maybe you can write your story with a lustier outcome. Ashton Kutcher is available if you want to borrow him from my head. He resides there along with a dozen or so other leading male roles for my stories. 🙂
I suspect my hero might require a complete personality transplant for that ruse to be effective. Oh wait, I write fiction – prepare to surrender at the whim of the flimsiest of plot devices, o clearer off-er of the frankly deranged!
Like Linda said, when are you getting that novel written? What a creepy story. I thankfully can’t recall ever having anything creepy like that happen to me. I did live in a shady apartment area after my divorce, with some nice neighbors and some definitely sketchy neighbors. Once, they asked me, a single mom of two, for money and I said no. The daughter said it was for the baby’s diapers, but then I’d see the mom smoking and not working and I just kind of figured it wasn’t really going to be for diapers. I was barely scraping by myself, so I said no and they never bothered me again for money.
Cristina~Good thing you said no. One “yes” from people like that and next you’re watching their kids and feeding them too. You’d never hear an utterance of thanks and more likely get chewed out when your cat made one of them break out in hives. (see what I’ve become? just ask and I’ll tell you all the things that can go wrong in good intentions.)
This is so creepy/funny I had to tell my husband about it when he got home. You have the funniest life stories of anyone I know!!
Candice~I’m not sure if I’m proud to say this, but I have more. Many more.
All these years – and you STILL haven’t written the novel? Too traumatic perhaps. I once had a story that was too traumatic to tell. It featured my dog, a dodgy passport, and the imminent departure of an aircraft. On-no I can’t continue: Too tramatic!
Tooty~Please continue. I’m hooked. I need to know.