My brother-in-law spent four months dumping his grass clippings over the fence into my vegetable garden, and laughed about it at a family party in front of twenty-five people. Ten days after the last load, every plant I had started curling in on itself — including a tomato line my father had kept going for forty-four seasons.

He was distributing it, on purpose, thirty envelopes at a time, for thirty-eight years, to people he barely knew, because the only way a thing like that survives is if it is in more than one place.

Randy and I are all right. That is the ending nobody wants and it is the true one.

He came round in the September, on his own, and stood in my kitchen and said he had read the letter from the insurer eleven times and that the part he could not get past was that he had been told in writing in March.

He said, “I just didn’t read it.”

Which is exactly right and is the whole thing.

He did not dump that grass out of malice. He dumped it because it was four feet closer than the yard waste bin and because the first two times nothing happened, and because when he said it’s basically the same yard at a party, twenty-five people let it go.

Including me.

Nobody here wants to hear about your grass again.

He said that about a bed of plants that were already dying at that moment and that neither of us knew were dying, because a piece of paper with three paragraphs on it was sitting under a fruit bowl eleven feet from where he was standing.

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