She has been kind to me since. I am not sure I would have been, in her position.
My grief wanted a witness.
It wanted the whole street standing on its doorsteps looking at what that woman had done to my husband’s trees on the day we buried him.
And I let it make the decision for four hours, while there was an apple in a lunchbox three doors away.
And then there is my son.
Rory knew about the chalk on the shed door. His dad had shown him the day he sprayed. He had stood next to him while he wrote it.
At the fence that first afternoon, with his dad’s cap in his hands and his sister on his hip, he was going to say it.
I saw his fingers go tight on that peak.
He did not say it.
He told me why about a month later, at bedtime, in the dark, when I was not expecting it.
He said: I was going to say about the spray. And then she said Dad’s not here any more. And I thought if I said it, she’d just say that again.
He was ten. He had the one fact that mattered, and he did not use it, because a grown woman had just shown him that the only thing she had to say about his father was that he was gone.
I told him it was not his job.
I told him that the waiting time was his dad’s job, and then mine, and never his, and that he did everything right by being with his sister.
He said: Dad said not before.
And I said: he did. And you remembered. That’s the part that counts.
He sleeps with that cap on the bedpost.
The trees are fine. The branches that split have been cut back clean, by a man who came round and would not take any money for it because he had known Hamish at work.
Next year we are going to pick on the right day. Rory is going to write the date on the shed door himself.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a neighbour who stole a dead man’s apples, and got her comeuppance on her own front lawn in front of the whole street.
I understand why. It is a satisfying story and I have heard it told back to me at the school gate by people who were not there.
