Chapter 7: The Crew
The GreenEdge Landscaping truck turned onto Foxglove Lane just after nine on a Tuesday morning, when the street was at its emptiest β children in school, parents at work, the dog walkers gone β and it parked, with the quiet confidence of a vehicle that belonged there, in front of 14 Foxglove Lane.
Cole Brandt climbed out of the cab with a clipboard and stood a moment looking at the house.
He was thirty-four, sunburned in the way of men who work outdoors, and he had been a foreman for six years, which was long enough to know that jobs came in two kinds: the kind where everything matched, and the kind where something was off, and the off-ness traveled downhill until it landed on the man holding the clipboard. He could not have said yet which kind this was. But something about the street β its quiet, its neatness, the way the young trees in the yard stood in their fresh mulch like a sentence somebody had taken care writing β made him check the work order a second time before he let the crew unload.
The order was one page. Removal: six ornamental trees, front lot. Stumps ground. Debris hauled. It carried the GreenEdge job number, the address, and a signature β one signature β in blue ink at the bottom, looped and decisive.
"Who signed off?" his crewman Daryl asked, dropping the tailgate.
Cole looked at the name again. "President of the homeowners' association," he said.
"Huh," Daryl said. "Fancy."
The third man, Pete, was laying out cones. They worked the way crews do, in a choreography of efficiencies: saws racked, fuel mixed, the chipper backed off the trailer with a beeping that sounded, in the empty street, very loud.
Across the street and two doors down, Eleanor Vance lowered her coffee cup onto the porch rail and did not pick it up again.
Eleanor was seventy-four, a retired librarian, and she had lived there longer than anyone except the Abernathys. She watched the street the way she had once watched a reading room: completely, and without feeling any need to announce it. She had seen Dan plant those trees on his knees in the cool of the evening, one by one, with his daughter holding the level. She had seen Priya bring out the lemonade. She had read, because Eleanor read everything the HOA posted, the newsletter in which Brenda Kessler had written paragraphs about "visual harmony" and "the disciplined landscape." And she had noticed β librarians notice filing errors the way other people notice smoke β that the trees at number fourteen had gone into the ground the month that newsletter appeared.
Now there was a landscaping truck at that curb, and no Whitaker car in the drive.
Eleanor was not a dramatic woman. She did not run into the street. She took her phone from the pocket of her cardigan and photographed the truck, and then, because her grandson had taught her how and because it seemed important to be precise, she took a video β steady, the way you film something you intend somebody to believe later.
On the Whitaker lawn, Cole walked the job one last time. Six trees. Young, healthy, well kept β and you could tell well kept; neglected trees had a look, and these did not have it. His unease, which had no name yet, made him do something he did not usually do on a removal. He took out his phone and photographed the work order on the clipboard, signature and all, and then he photographed the yard as it stood: trees whole, mulch neat, and beside each trunk a painted stake with a number on it, in a child's hand.
"We good?" Daryl called.
Cole looked at the signature again. The order was real. The company had taken the job by phone from the association's president, the invoice would go to the association, and everything about it was regular except the feeling in his stomach β which was not, he reminded himself, a line item GreenEdge paid him for.
"Yeah," he said, and heard how flat it sounded. "We're good. Set up."
Pete started the chipper to warm it. The sound rolled down Foxglove Lane and glanced off the houses, and on her porch Eleanor Vance flinched slightly and kept filming.
A silver sedan turned onto the street, moving slowly, and parked at the far end, under the oak that shaded the mailbox kiosk. It stopped at no house. Nobody got out. Eleanor, who knew every car on the street the way she had once known the Dewey decimals, recognized it, and her mouth settled into a thin, unhappy line.
"Well," she said to no one β to the empty porch, to the street at large. "Isn't that interesting."
She went inside, found a pen, and wrote the time on the back of a grocery receipt, because some habits of accuracy outlive the jobs that taught them.