Chapter 2
"Ray." Marlene stood at the edge of her patio with her arms crossed and her robe pulled tight against the morning damp. "What are you doing to my fence?"
It was not my fence, and it was not hers either, not exactly. It was the shared fence, the white PVC run that divided our parcels down the middle of the cul-de-sac, and the post I was working on stood in the ground between us like a border marker neither of us had ever fully agreed on. But Marlene had a way of claiming things by naming them, and this morning she had named the fence hers.
"Maintenance," I said, without looking up. "Swapping out the old panel for a weather-tight enclosure. It was rusting through."
"That post sits on the easement," she said. "The easement runs right through the centerline. You know that. And you never pull permits for any of this."
I set my screwdriver down on the tool roll and stood up slowly, my knees protesting the way knees do at sixty-eight after an hour in wet grass. "The post is two inches on my side of the pin, Marlene. I measured it. And a panel swap is not a construction project."
"Two inches?" She laughed, short and sharp. "You think two inches settles it? The easement is the easement. The county platted it down the centerline, and everything you bolt to that post is in it. You have been digging along this fence for weeks, Ray. I have watched you. Every evening, a little more trench, a little more pipe, and then you cover it up like you think nobody notices."
I felt the heat rise in my face, the way it does when someone is wrong in a way that is hard to correct without saying more than you should. "I am not digging up your yard, Marlene. The trench is on my side. It is my ground."
"Your ground?" She stepped closer to the fence, close enough that I could see the lines around her mouth tighten. "Your ground is where the survey says it is, and the survey says that post is shared. You do not get to rewire a shared fence in the dark and call it maintenance."
We had lived next to each other for years, and we had never been friends, exactly, but we had managed a kind of armed politeness: waves from driveways, short talk about the weather, an understanding that neither of us would make the other's life harder than it had to be. That understanding was gone this morning. Something had shifted in her, some decision made before she ever came outside, and I could see it in the set of her shoulders.
"I am calling the deputies," she said.
"Marlene, come on. This is a fence post, not a crime scene."
"It is a crime scene if you are stealing power," she said, and the words landed flat and hard between us. "You think I do not know? You think I cannot hear it? That box hums all night, Ray. It hums through my foundation. My lights flicker. My refrigerator kicked off last week. So yes, I am calling the deputies, and they can look at your little enclosure and tell us both what it really is."
There had been a surveyor once, years back, when the fence first went up, a young man with a tripod and a clipboard who had stood exactly where I was standing and driven the pin into the ground while Marlene and I both watched from our own sides. He had said the line was the line, and we had both nodded, and then we had gone back to our lives as if a pin in the dirt settled anything between two people who share a fence. It did not. It only gave us a number to argue about, and Marlene had never forgotten a number in her life.
She had also never forgotten a slight. I remembered the year my downspout drained toward her flower bed, and the year her contractor parked his truck across my driveway for a week, and the careful way we had each apologized without ever quite admitting fault. That was how we had lived: two people keeping score in pencil, erasing the marks whenever the weather was good, writing them back in whenever it was not. This morning, the pencil had snapped.
She turned before I could answer, walked back across her patio with quick, hard steps, and went inside. The screen door slapped shut behind her. I stood in the wet grass with my tool roll open and my coffee cold, listening to the faint hum coming up through the post, and I thought about how fast a morning can turn, and how long a man can spend building something he believes is keeping his house standing, only to have a neighbor name it a theft.