Chapter 7: Saturday Morning
She came at eight o'clock.
I was already in the garden when she pushed open the gate.
She was wearing old jeans and a grey sweatshirt and she had brought her own gloves, thick rubber ones, the kind you use for serious work.
She stood at the edge of the path and looked at what she had done.
The roses were bruised but not broken.
The grass had recovered from most of it.
The pear tree still had a faint stain on the bark near the base where something had been left too long.
She looked at that for a moment without speaking.
"Start with the path," I said.
"There's a broom beside the gate."
She started with the path.
I worked alongside her.
Not to supervise.
I simply had my own tasks — the geraniums needed deadheading, and the soil around the base of the pear tree needed turning.
We worked quietly for the first hour.
The street was still mostly asleep.
A dog barked somewhere two blocks over.
The light was the pale gold kind that only happens in the early morning.
Around nine, I brought out two cups of tea and set them on the porch steps.
She sat down beside me.
We drank without talking.
Then she said, "Your husband planted this tree?"
"The spring we moved in.
He carried it from the nursery in the back of our station wagon wrapped in a wet cloth.
He was very particular about the root ball."
"How long ago was that?"
"Forty-one years."
She looked at the tree.
It was old enough now that the trunk had real thickness to it, real weight.
The kind of tree that doesn't ask permission to be there anymore.
"He sounds like he was a good man," she said.
"He was a methodical man," I said.
"Which in the end amounts to the same thing."
She smiled.
It was the first real smile I had seen from her.
It changed her face considerably.
We went back to work.
By noon the yard was clean.
Better than clean — she had edged the path without being asked, and she had found the banana peel in the fork of the pear tree and removed it carefully, as if she understood it didn't belong there.
She stood at the gate when she was ready to leave.
"Mrs.
Marsh," she said.
"Can I ask — what was it?
The thing in the box.
What made you think of it?"
"Gerald always said the best response to someone who won't listen is to make them feel what they've been causing," I said.
"The camera was the clearest way I could think of to do that."
She nodded slowly.
"It was effective."
"Most honest things are."
She lifted her hand in a small wave and went back to her house.
I stood in the garden for a while after she left.
The geraniums were tidy.
The path was clear.
The pear tree stood where it had always stood, unhurried, solid, full of years.
May you like
I put my hand on the bark for a moment the way I sometimes do.
Then I went inside and made lunch.
