The president of our homeowners’ association stood on my best friend’s patio in her robe at midnight, pointed at her biker neighbor on his knees beside the hole he’d dug, and said, “Make them cuff him, Sheila. I told you what his kind bury.” My friend was in the cardiac unit. He’d asked me for one thing.
Guadalupe had been up there twelve days with a new valve in her heart.
Her surgeon had told me, because mine is the name on her emergency card, that one bad shock could undo all of it.
The shovel woke me at 11:52.
I went out my back gate in slippers with the big yellow flashlight I carry on watch patrol, and the beam found him on the second sweep.
Johnnie Nilsson.
He lived on Guadalupe’s other side. Sixty-three, six-foot-five, a silver beard he kept short, old faded ink from his wrists up over both shoulders and an eagle spread across his chest.
His shirt was off in the heat.
His vest was draped across the back of Guadalupe’s patio chair, the one she drank her coffee in.
He was standing in a hole up to his shins in the back corner of her yard.
Next to it, on the grass, lay a long shape done up in brown burlap and tied around and around with twine.
As long as a man.
“Johnnie,” I said. “What is that.”
He laid the shovel across the dirt and put his hands up at me, palms out, like I was the one who was armed.
“Give me till six, Sheila,” he said. “Don’t call anybody. Just till six.”
“What’s in the burlap?”
“Till six.”
I’d been watch captain on our street in Mesa for seven years.
My thumb was dialing before I’d decided anything.
Two deputies pulled up at 12:09 with their lights going and no siren.
Mrs. Lai was right behind them, across the street in a terry-cloth robe with pineapples on it.
She’d been after Johnnie’s motorcycle for three years. Letters about the noise. Fines for the little trailer he parked beside it. A petition I never did sign.
“He’s putting something in that poor woman’s yard,” she said. “Look at the SIZE of it.”
The younger deputy told Johnnie to get down on his knees.
He got down on his knees.
“Is this your property, sir?”
Johnnie looked up at Guadalupe’s dark kitchen window.
Nothing.
“Do you have the owner’s permission?”
Nothing.
“What’s inside the wrap?”
He looked at the burlap a long time. Then he gave them the only whole sentence they got out of him that night.
“Nobody fills that in, and nobody calls HER.”
Mrs. Lai laughed out loud on the patio steps.
“Make them cuff him, Sheila. I told you what his kind bury.”
I didn’t say a WORD.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
The older deputy, a heavy man whose name tag said Kwok, crouched with his flashlight by the bundle and reached for the twine.
“Please,” Johnnie said. “Not in the dark. You’ll ruin it.”
Kwok looked at him a while.
Then he talked into his radio by the gate, and when he came back they ran yellow tape around Guadalupe’s patio.
“Day shift opens it with a sergeant,” he said. “Nobody touches it till then. That includes you, ma’am.”
Mrs. Lai pulled her robe tighter.
They put Johnnie in the back of the car with no shirt on and his hands behind him.
His vest stayed on her chair.
I didn’t sleep.
At 2:40 my phone lit up on the nightstand. Kwok, from county lockup, checking next of kin.
“Your name’s on her card,” he said. “Do we call her at the hospital?”
I thought about the surgeon’s face.
“No,” I said. “Don’t you DARE call her.”
“He’s not asking for a lawyer,” Kwok said. “He already used his one call.”
“On who?”
“Didn’t say. Took him eleven seconds.”
At 6:48 four motorcycles came up our street in a line and backed in along Guadalupe’s curb, rear tires to the concrete.
Four men in faded vests got off and stood on the sidewalk with their arms folded.
Not one of them looked at my house.
At 7:05 a dump truck heaped with fill dirt turned the corner with the association’s contractor painted on the door.
Mrs. Lai walked beside it in real clothes now, holding a clipboard.
“That hole is a safety hazard,” she said to the riders. “This is association business. Move those things.”
The tallest one said, “Morning, ma’am.”
He didn’t move.
None of them moved.
The truck needed the driveway, and four bikes and four men stood exactly where its back wheels had to go.
Kwok came back at 7:25 with a sergeant, still in last night’s uniform. He looked at the riders, then the truck, then me.
“You’re the contact,” he said. “Come on.”
I ducked under the tape behind him.
He cut the twine at the top end and folded the burlap back.
Leaves.
Dark green leaves, and a hard little lemon the size of a walnut that rolled off onto the grass.
It was a tree. Root ball and all, wrapped for the ride on Johnnie’s trailer.
I turned around to the back corner. To the hole.
I’d never once looked up the night before.
Guadalupe’s lemon tree had stood right there for thirty-one years. Her husband planted it the spring they closed on the house.
She sat under it EVERY morning with her coffee and her crossword.
Now there was a ring of sawdust the size of a kitchen table.
Behind me the truck’s engine cut off.
Taped to the inside of the gate post was a pink carbon copy of a work order. Removal, root damage to the common wall. Charged to Guadalupe’s account, $1,850.
Two signatures at the bottom. Board president. Board secretary.
I’m the board secretary.
Eight days earlier Mrs. Lai had brought a stack of papers to my porch and told me they were pool-gate invoices. I signed every one without my reading glasses.
And right under hers, in my own loopy hand, MY OWN NAME.
Mrs. Lai came up to the tape. She looked at the riders, then at me.
“You signed it too, Sheila,” she said. “So think very hard about who you tell.”
Guadalupe was coming home Thursday.
The gate post
I reached past her and pulled the pink copy off the post. The tape came with it.
Then I turned my back on her and held it out to Kwok.
“That’s my name,” I said. “She brought me a stack of papers and said they were pool-gate invoices. I signed them on my porch without my glasses.”
Kwok took it by the corner and read it. Then he read it again.
“Ma’am, this part’s civil,” he said. “Trees, walls, who owes who. I don’t do trees.”
“Then let Johnnie go.”
The sergeant had stood at the edge of the patio the whole time with his thumbs in his belt. It was the first thing he said.
“Your neighbor was in a yard that isn’t his, at midnight, digging a hole. That’s trespass till the owner says it isn’t. In writing.”
“The owner’s in the cardiac unit.”
“Then he waits where he is.”
The truck driver had climbed down and was leaning on his fender, eating sunflower seeds out of the bag.
“Well, I can save everybody the trouble,” Mrs. Lai said. “I’ll just give her a call.”
“You will not.”
She held up her phone. “I have her room number, Sheila. Do you?”
Pie tins
The spring of 2014, Guadalupe’s lemon tree threw so many suckers her husband said it was trying to have puppies.
She cut every one and rooted them in coffee cans along her patio wall. When they took, she wired a strip of pie tin to each little trunk and pressed a name into it with a ballpoint, hard enough that the rain couldn’t get it.
Then she loaded them in a red wagon and went door to door.
Mine said SHEILA. I left it in my car one afternoon that July and it was dead by supper.
Johnnie had been next door to her two years by then. He put his in the back corner of his yard, against the block wall, where it got her shade in the afternoon. I don’t think it ever made a lemon.
Mrs. Lai opened her door to the wagon and said citrus brings rats.
The next spring she ran for president unopposed. That fall she came up my walk with a yellow flashlight with a red bow stuck on the lens.
“You’re home all day,” she said. “You see everything. We need you.”
So I was watch captain. Then the secretary quit and nobody else would do it, so I was that too.
Once a month she came by with a manila envelope. Board mail, letters from owners, invoices, all of it already opened. I three-hole-punched every sheet into the green binder on my kitchen counter and signed where she put her finger.
Seven years. I never read a page. She’d read it, and she was the president.
Guadalupe used to say that binder was the only thing in my kitchen that never got dusty.
That was all I had at 7:40 on a Monday morning with my slippers soaked from Guadalupe’s grass.
Mrs. Lai’s thumb was on the screen of her phone.
Saturday at two
“Ma’am,” Kwok said. “Put it away.”
She looked at him. She looked at the four men on the sidewalk. Then she dropped the phone in her purse.
“The truck comes back at four,” she said. “If that hole is open at four, I call the hospital, and I tell her exactly who was digging behind her house.”
I tried the one thing I had.
“I’m on her emergency card,” I said to the sergeant. “I’m the one they call. I say Johnnie had permission.”
“Did he?”
I didn’t answer fast enough.
“That card’s for if her heart stops,” he said. “It doesn’t give you her yard. And now I’ve got you on record saying something you can’t back up.”
He wrote in his notebook. It took him a while.
The driver had finished his seeds. I went over to him, because he was the only one there who’d had a chainsaw in that yard.
“When did you cut it?”
“Saturday crew. Two o’clock.” He folded the bag into his shirt pocket. “Order said the owner’d been notified.”
“Notified by who?”
He tipped his chin at the pink copy in Kwok’s hand.
Saturday at two I was on the fourth floor of the hospital, holding Guadalupe’s crossword while she slept. I’d put my visiting hours in the watch group text Friday night, the way I always do, so nobody calls 911 when my car’s gone all day.
Mrs. Lai is in the watch group. Mrs. Lai started the watch group.
“I don’t pick the days, ma’am,” the driver said. “I go where the paper says. Paper says fill and grade.”
He climbed back up in his cab.
“See you at four.”
The green binder
The treasurer is a retired dentist on the corner lot who comes to meetings when there’s cake. I called him from my kitchen.
“What vote?” he said. “We haven’t voted on anything since the pool heater.”
“There’s a work order for Guadalupe’s tree. Eighteen-fifty. Two signatures.”
“Whose?”
I didn’t say.
“Sheila. Whose?”
“I’ll call you back.”
The binder sat where it always sits, between the toaster and the dish rack. I got my reading glasses.
Pool-gate invoices, three of them, all from June. A letter from Mrs. Lai to Johnnie about the trailer. The same letter again with FINAL NOTICE stamped on it in red. April’s minutes, in my own handwriting, which I did not remember writing.
Then association letterhead, the first week of September, from the president to Guadalupe. Your tree is damaging the common wall. The board requests your consent to remove it at the association’s expense.
At the association’s expense.
Behind it, on the blue paper Guadalupe writes her Christmas cards on, her answer.
To the board. The tree stays. My husband planted it. If the wall needs fixing, fix the wall and send me the bill. I will pay for the wall. I will not pay for the tree.
Dated September 30. Three weeks before her surgery.
The envelope was still stapled to the back, slit clean along the top.
Under her name, in smaller letters, she’d added one more line.
Sheila, read this one.
The corner by his wall
By eleven the sergeant had pulled the tape and taken it with him.
I went back over with the blue letter folded in my sweatshirt pocket. The tallest rider was in Guadalupe’s yard running Johnnie’s hose over the block wall, slow, onto the root end of the burlap.
“He’ll want it wet,” he said.
“What did he say to you? On the phone.”
“Lupe’s driveway. Seven. Stand on it.”
“That took eleven seconds?”
“He said it twice.”
One of the other three was asleep sitting up on his seat with his arms folded.
“Where did he buy it?”
The rider looked at the wall and didn’t answer.
There was a bucket upside down by Guadalupe’s spigot. I dragged it over and stood on it, and the rider put a hand under my elbow without being asked.
Johnnie’s yard is gravel and one old weight bench. In the back corner, against our side of the wall, there was a hole about the size of the one he’d been standing in at midnight, the dirt heaped on a blue tarp.
On his back step sat a rusted coffee can. Empty.
I got down.
I knelt where Kwok had folded the burlap back and ran my hand in under the leaves, along the trunk. Down low, something scratched my wrist.
A strip of pie tin, gone gray, wired on with green garden wire the bark had half swallowed.
I turned it to the side with the letters.
JOHNNIE.
The rider shut off the hose.
“She’s going to see this yard Thursday either way, ma’am,” he said. “Somebody ought to tell her before the yard does.”
Fourth floor
The nurse at the desk had cats all over her scrubs.
“I have to tell her something bad,” I said.
“Is it worse if she finds out Thursday?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll stand in the door.”
Guadalupe was sitting up with the crossword on her tray and her glasses on the end of her nose. She’d done the top half in pen.
I told her the tree first. Then Saturday at two. Then the hole, and Johnnie on his knees, and the cuffs, and Mrs. Lai on her steps in the pineapple robe.
The nurse kept her eyes on the monitor over the bed.
Guadalupe put her pen down.
“Did he bring his?” she said.
“Yes.”
She closed her eyes. The numbers on the monitor went up, and then they came back down.
“There’s more,” I said. “My name’s on the work order. Under hers.”
She opened her eyes.
“I didn’t read it. I didn’t read your letter either. I punched holes in it.”
“Five weeks.”
“Yes.”
She held out her hand for my pen and wrote along the bottom of the crossword, under the clues. Johnnie Nilsson has my permission to be in my yard at any hour and plant whatever he wants in it. She signed her whole name and dated it.
Then she asked the nurse for her purse.
She took out her emergency card and crossed my name off it with my pen.
Four o’clock
The sergeant read the crossword at the substation counter at two-thirty and made a copy. At 3:40 Johnnie walked out the side door in a county T-shirt, and the tallest rider was at the curb with his engine running.
At four the truck turned the corner.
Mrs. Lai walked beside it again. The treasurer came up from the corner lot in golf shorts, because I’d called him back.
Johnnie was on his knees in Guadalupe’s yard, filling the bottom of the hole from the hose. He didn’t get up.
I handed the driver the blue letter, with the copy of the crossword under it.
He read them standing in the street. Then he looked at Mrs. Lai.
“So the owner said no in writing? Before we cut?”
“That woman is seventy-seven and on God knows what,” Mrs. Lai said. “And that letter is association correspondence, and Sheila had no business taking it out of the binder. That wall has a crack you can put your finger in. You think I enjoyed this? Somebody on this street has to think about the wall, and property values, and what gets revved in that driveway at six in the morning. She’d have sat in that chair in front of your saw. You know she would. And he’d have stood next to her in that vest. So it got done when it could get done. That’s what a president is for.”
The treasurer said, “There wasn’t a vote.”
“There were two signatures.”
The driver folded both papers and handed them back to me.
“I’m not filling a yard the owner said no to,” he said. “But somebody owes my boss eighteen-fifty for Saturday.”
“Bill the secretary,” Mrs. Lai said. “Her name’s right there.”
I got my checkbook out and wrote it against the fender. Eighteen hundred fifty and no cents. My hand went bad on the zero and I wrote it over.
He put the check in his shirt pocket with the seeds.
I took the yellow flashlight out of my purse and held it out to Mrs. Lai. She didn’t take it, so I set it on the hood of the truck.
“Don’t be dramatic, Sheila,” she said. “You’ll be back on the board by spring. You always say yes.”
“There’ll be a notice on every mailbox tonight,” the treasurer said. “Special meeting. Removal of an officer.”
“On what grounds?”
“You just told me.”
She looked at the four motorcycles and went back across the street without the flashlight.
Johnnie stood up. He took his vest off the back of Guadalupe’s chair and put it on over the county shirt.
“You told her,” he said.
“In person,” I said. “Nobody called.”
Thursday
I drove Guadalupe home Thursday at ten, a white hospital bag on her lap and Johnnie’s name on the contact line of her discharge papers.
The notice was still taped to the mailboxes when we turned in. Somebody had written YES across it in ballpoint.
Mrs. Lai’s blinds were down.
Johnnie was kneeling in the back corner at the lemon’s roots, packing the dirt around it with his flat hands. It stood in the middle of the sawdust ring, a little crooked at the top, two hard green lemons on it.
His vest hung on the back of her chair. He’d put it there when he heard my car.
Guadalupe sat down and leaned back against the leather and did her crossword. She didn’t say anything about the tree. My checkbook was in my purse at my feet, the stub on top.
When she finished the last clue she reached under the chair and handed me a coffee can of wet dirt with a green stick in it. A strip of pie tin was wired to the stick. SHEILA, pressed in hard, in Johnnie’s square letters.
“Water it this time,” she said.
If this one got to you, send it to the friend who would actually read the letter for you.
For more stories where motorcycles and buried history collide, read The Dead Man’s Motorcycle Parked in My Half of the Garage and My Sergeant Carried Me Home in 1970. His Daughter Says I Conned Him.. There’s another family mystery waiting in The Eleven Motorcycles Behind the Hog Barn at My Daughter’s Sale.
