She said: my husband put in a plum tree when we got our house.
She said: it took three years to give fruit.
She said: he didn’t live to see the fourth year.
She said: but I did.
She said: and the fruit was very good.
I said: I’m sorry.
She said: yes.
She said: but the tree is still there.
She said: so it’s all right.
She got out of the car.
She knocked on the roof twice, the way people knock on a door when they are leaving.
She walked to her own car.
She was small and white-haired and she had driven forty-five minutes and stood in a courtroom with shaking knees and said what she had come to say.
I watched her go.
Then I drove.
I went home.
Not the rental.
The house the settlement had given me.
The house we had bought two years ago when Thomas said it wasn’t the one with the big yard but it was a start.
