The hardest part of the whole business, harder than the sheriff, harder than the county, harder than the long table in Bend, was putting a price on the arbor.
Insurance people and restitution people cannot do their jobs without numbers, so numbers were requested, and I sat in the garage with a tape measure and a notebook feeling like a man appraising his own memories for a yard sale.
Cedar is easy. Cedar has a price per board foot, and if you do not like one lumberyard's number you can drive to another and get a worse one. Labor is easy too, or easy enough. A contractor will happily tell you what a day of his crew costs, in handwriting.
Thirty years does not have a rate.
My grandfather, Walter Reed, built that arbor in 1993, out of cedar he reclaimed from a barn that was coming down two properties over. He picked the boards himself. He rejected half of them, Claire's favorite fact, standing in a stranger's collapsing barn holding lengths of wood up to the light like a man choosing fabric.
The joints were hand-cut. Not because he was precious about it. Because, he said, a joint you cut yourself will tell you when it is wrong before a screw will.
The screws were brass. I found one in the dirt the morning Vivian left, half buried beside the herb border, and I put it in my pocket, and it rode around in there for a week like a small, accusing coin.
And then there were the height marks.
On the inside of the eastern post, in pencil and then, as the kids got more serious about the project, in permanent marker, were the lines where Owen and Lily had measured themselves every summer. Owen's lines climbed steady and boring. Lily's jumped, stalled, then leapt past two of his in one year, a fact she cited regularly and with footnotes.
An adjuster stood in my yard with a clipboard and looked at that post, when I showed him, the way a man looks at something he is about to undervalue professionally.
"We can include the post as a structural member," he said.
"It is a structural member," I said. "It also has my children on it."
He nodded with genuine sympathy and wrote down the price of a cedar post.
I do not fault him. It was his job to translate the world into a spreadsheet, and most of the world cooperates. My arbor would not. In the end the number agreed for restitution was fair for wood and work and completely silent about everything else, and Peter told me that was how it would be, and that a silent number was still worth taking.
"A court can give you back the cost of the thing," he said. "Nobody can give you back the years in the thing. Those you have to keep yourself, or lose yourself. Law has no drawer for them."
So I made my own inventory, the one that did not go in any file.
The main trunk of the grapevine had survived. That was the largest fact. Walter had planted it the year he built the frame, and its base was as thick as my wrist now, twisted, patient, rooted deeper than any of our arguments.
One vine was gone completely. Vivian's saw had gone through it close to the trunk, clean as a signature. That one would not come back, and the gap in the canopy where it used to run was visible every time I stood under what was left.
The third vine had been torn half loose and left hanging, and everyone, including a man from the nursery I finally consulted, expected it to die. It did not. It leafed out late and sparsely, offended-looking, but green. Alive out of what I can only describe as a refusal to cooperate with the narrative.
The herb garden border could be restacked in an afternoon. Stones do not hold grudges. The rosemary had survived being stepped around better than the thyme had, which Claire recorded in her garden notebook with the gravity of a war correspondent.
Two cedar crosspieces were split beyond use. The rest I had stacked in the garage, numbered in chalk, because some part of me believed, for a while, that the whole thing could simply be put back, like a shelf.
Wood does not work that way. Neither, I was learning, does anything else.
I kept the brass screw. It sits on my desk now, in a jar lid, next to paper clips.
It is not valuable. That is the point of it. Everything Vivian destroyed had two prices, and she only ever understood one of them, which is probably why she thought she could settle the whole account with a fake document and a check.