PART 5 — THE SOUTH FENCE
The settlement was thirty-four thousand, paid by Charlene and Ainsley jointly over eighteen months, and it is nearly finished being paid.
Beau’s parents got their eleven thousand four hundred back within nine days, which tells you they asked for it in a way that did not involve lawyers.
Beau and Ainsley are still married. I did not know whether they would be and I want to say clearly that I never wanted that outcome and I have never been asked to have an opinion about it. He came out to Sable Point in September, by himself, without telling her, and stood in the driveway and apologized for a solid five minutes and then asked if he could help with anything, and I put him to work moving sod for six hours because I could not think of anything else to do with a man that sorry.
Charlene and I are cordial. It took two years. She has never said a word about that brunch and neither have I, and we cook Thanksgiving together now in a way that works fine and is not what it was.
Ainsley and I do not speak. She sent a letter in the first year. It was four pages and about half of it was an apology and the other half was an explanation of the various ways in which the situation had been unfair to her, and I stopped at the part where she wrote that I could have just told her the roses mattered.
They were fifty-one-year-old roses in a hedge along a fence. I had told her nothing in the garden. It was one of the three conditions.
And Trent.
That is the part of this that took the longest and cost the most and that people never ask about, because it is not satisfying.
He did not want me to file. He said it for six weeks — that it was money, that we’d get the lawn back, that this would blow up the family for a hedge.
I moved out to the lake house in August and stayed there four months.
What changed him was not me. It was that he watched the footage. All thirty-one hours, alone, over about a week, because I told him he did not get to have an opinion until he had.
He came out to Sable Point on a Thursday in November and sat on the porch step and said, “She said you were soft, and she was right, and the reason she was right is me.”
That is an accurate sentence and it took him four months to build it.
We did the work. Actual work, with a person, for two years. He is different now in ways that are small and real — he says no to his mother about once a month now, over nothing, on purpose, like a man doing physical therapy.
The house is in a trust now, in my name alone, with Devon as successor. That was Imelda’s idea and Trent signed it without being asked twice, and I have chosen to take that as the apology it was meant to be.
The lawn came back in the second spring. The septic is oversized now, which the inspector found funny.
The roses are the thing.
They were gone. Eleven canes, fifty-one years, no commercial source, and I had accepted that.
Then in April, Gus Petrakis came across the property line with a coffee can and a face like a man delivering a subpoena, and told me that in 2011 he had taken cuttings off my grandmother’s hedge without asking her, because he wanted them and she was particular, and that he had been feeling guilty about it for fourteen years.
There are four of them along the south fence now.
They’re four years old. They’re waist-high. They will not look like her hedge in my lifetime and might in Devon’s daughter’s.
I sat out there in June with the two repaired pillows on the porch swing, and I thought about a woman in a white sundress in her mother’s dining room telling me, in front of twenty people, that instead of standing there I should have started cleaning.
She was half right, honestly.
There was a mess. It had been accumulating for eleven years, in small amounts, every time I decided the fight was more expensive than the yielding.
May you like
