My neighbor stood at the fence and made my six-year-old carry apples across our yard to him, one armful at a time.
I watched it happen from my own deck.
I was holding a basket of wet laundry. I’d come outside to hang the beach towels on the line. I stood there with a damp towel in one hand and a clothespin in the other, and for about forty seconds, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.
Then I understood.
And I’ve been trying to forgive myself for those forty seconds ever since.
The tree is Dale’s.
I’ll say that right at the start, because it matters. It’s a big old apple tree, McIntosh I think, with a thick gray trunk and branches that spread out wide like arms. It grows on his side of the fence, about six feet back from the property line.
But about a third of it hangs over our fence. So every August and September, we get apples in our grass. In the flower bed. Under the swing set. In the driveway, where they get squashed under the car tires and turn into brown mush that sticks to everything.
I’ve raked them. Every year. For five years.
I’ve bagged them in those big brown paper lawn bags and dragged them to the curb. Twelve bags one year. I counted.
Two years ago, one rotted against the side of our shed in the corner of the yard and left a dark brown stain on the white paint. It’s still there. Rob scrubbed it twice. It didn’t come off.
I never complained. Not once. Not to Dale. Not to anybody.
It was just apples. That’s what I told myself. It’s a tree. Trees drop things. That’s what trees do.
My name is Sarah. I’m thirty-six. My husband, Rob, is thirty-eight. He’s an insurance claims adjuster, which means he spends all day reading reports and looking at photographs of damaged things and figuring out exactly who’s responsible for what.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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