My husband’s brother finished running his chain-link fence seven feet into my yard and said, “You can’t even pay off Gordon’s headstone, Eileen. Who’s paying your lawyer?” I still owed $1,850 on that stone. Seventeen days later, in front of the whole family, he handed me a paper to sign, and I handed him something back.
Gordon had been in the ground since the last week of July, and the land behind that fence held the tomato beds he built the summer Christy was born.
Forty-four years he weeded them.
Burt and Trina had lived on the other side of the line since 1987. The two brothers bought the lots outside Saginaw off their father the same spring, a dollar apiece.
The morning the posts went in, I was eating toast over the kitchen sink.
Two men I’d never seen were pulling orange string from the corner of Burt’s garage straight across to my mailbox post.
One of them had a radio in his back pocket playing polka, low.
I went out in my slippers.
“Burt, that string’s on my side.”
He didn’t look up from his coffee. “Survey was always off, Eileen. Gordon knew it. He just let you have it.”
“Let me have my own yard?”
“Let you have mine.”
By Thursday it was chain-link, four feet high, with the gate on HIS side.
The tomato cages were still in there. So was the bench Gordon sat on to tie the vines.
I called Christy that night. She listened to all of it and then said, “Mom, it’s seven feet. Dad’s gone. Do you really want to fight Uncle Burt over dirt?”
Dirt.
The next Monday the monument place called.
“Mrs. Wisniewski, it’s Wesley Ramos. The stone’s finished, but we can’t set it till the balance clears.”
“How much is left?”
“Eighteen fifty. It’s out back with the others. We don’t cut the second date until it’s paid.”
I sat in Gordon’s truck in the driveway for an hour after that, because it was the only place left that still smelled like him.
His checkbook was somewhere in the roll-top desk. In forty-six years of marriage I had never once opened that desk.
It took me two evenings.
Under a drawer full of old fishing licenses there was a shoebox of check registers, the carbon kind, each year with its own rubber band.
1996 had something folded inside the back cover.
A cancelled check. Made out to Burt, in Gordon’s square printing, with Burt’s own signature across the back.
I read the memo line three times.
Then I put it in an envelope, put the envelope in my purse, and told nobody. Not even Christy.
That Saturday, Burt and Trina came over without calling. Trina brought a lemon loaf like it was the funeral all over again.
Burt laid a paper on my kitchen table and squared it with two fingers.
“Lot line agreement. You sign that, I write the monument place a check for the eighteen fifty. Gordon gets his date. Done.”
“You want me to sell you my yard for his headstone.”
“I want you to stop pretending it’s your yard.”
Trina patted my wrist. “We’re doing you a kindness, Eileen. Most people would’ve just put the fence up.”
“He DID just put the fence up.”
She took the lemon loaf home with her.
Tuesday I came back from the pharmacy and Gordon’s beds were gone.
The cedar boards were stacked by my trash cans with the screws still in them, and the dirt was raked flat where the tomatoes had been.
Burt was on his side of the chain-link with a beer, watching me find it.
“Figured you’d want the wood,” he said.
I went inside and checked that the envelope was still in my purse.
It was. I checked it twice more before bed.
Burt turned sixty-four the next Sunday, and Trina did it big.
Folding tables, a sheet cake from the grocery store, every cousin in the county, Christy and Jeremiah and both their boys.
Half of them parked on my lawn.
I went because Christy said if I didn’t, I’d look like the problem.
Burt waited until everybody had a plate.
Then he tapped his can with a fork, stood, and pulled the paper out of his shirt pocket.
“Most of you know my big brother’s stone is sitting behind the monument place with no date on it.”
Somebody said, “Aw, Burt.”
“So here’s what I’m doing. Eileen signs this little paper squaring up the line Gordon should’ve squared thirty years ago, and I pay that stone off TOMORROW MORNING.”
People clapped. Trina clapped loudest.
He held the pen out to me across the potato salad.
“Because THAT’S WHAT FAMILY DOES.”
Christy leaned down behind my chair. “Mom. Please. Just sign it so we can eat.”
Thirty people looking at me.
Jeremiah stopped chewing.
I opened my purse.
Burt’s grin stayed right where it was. He thought I was getting my reading glasses.
I took out the envelope, slid the check free and laid it face down on top of his paper, so the first thing he’d see was his own signature.
Then I pushed it across the table until it touched his can.
The potato salad
Burt turned it over.
Gordon had filled in the memo line in the same square printing he used on everything, the grocery lists, the Christmas tags, the masking tape on the freezer bags.
7 ft by the garage. Bought. Last time.
Two thousand five hundred dollars. June 11, 1996. Burt’s name across the back, and the bank’s stamp under it.
Burt read it. Then he laughed, louder than I’d ever heard him laugh at anything.
“That’s a loan,” he said to the table. “Gordy loaned me a little money in ’96 and wrote whatever he felt like on his own check. I paid him back inside a year.”
He put two fingers on it to slide it toward his shirt pocket. I kept my hand flat on the other end.
“It says bought, Burt.”
“It says what my brother wrote.”
Nobody was clapping now. Christy had straightened up behind my chair. One of the cousins from Frankenmuth set her fork down on her plate. Jeremiah started chewing again, slow.
Trina leaned over his shoulder and read it. She read it a lot longer than it takes to read one line.
“June of ’96,” she said. “That’s the boat.”
“Trina.”
“You told me the boat was overtime.” She looked at him, then at me, then back at the check. “Last time what, Burt?”
1996
That was the summer the orange stakes showed up the first time.
I’d forgotten them. They came back to me right there at the folding table, the way an old phone number does. Four stakes in a line from the corner of Burt’s garage toward our mailbox, with a string between. One morning in May they were just there. Gordon walked out in his work boots and stood looking at them a long time, and came back in, and didn’t say a word.
By the Fourth of July they were gone. By August Burt had a bass boat on a trailer in his driveway, green, with sparkles in the paint. He took Christy out on the bay and let her steer. She was fourteen.
I asked Gordon once where Burt got money for a boat.
“He’s got it,” Gordon said.
Gordon could make two words shut a door. That was how he was with his brother their whole lives. Burt was the baby by six years. We’d been renting the little house from their dad since the wedding, and Gordon had been breaking his back in that garden since ’82, so when the old man sold the lots, Gordon got the one with the black dirt. Burt got the one with the clay.
The beds went in the summer Christy was born. I can still see her in the laundry basket at the end of the row, in a sun hat of mine that came down over her ears.
Burt borrowed Gordon’s mower for eleven years and brought it back empty every time. Gordon filled it and said nothing.
And Gordon kept paper. Every check register, every carbon, every year rubber-banded, in the roll-top I didn’t open. Not because he hid things, he said. The desk was his and the kitchen was mine and it worked.
I never asked what was in there. Forty-six years. I’m not proud of that.
“Last time what?” Trina said again.
“It means my brother liked to have the last word,” Burt said. “Always did.”
He let go of the check.
I put it back in its envelope and the envelope in my purse, and I stood up. Christy said “Mom” once.
I walked home across my own lawn between the cars parked on it, and nobody stopped me.
The Register of Deeds
Monday a letter came from a lawyer in Bay City named Stanton.
It said Mr. Wisniewski’s offer regarding the monument was withdrawn. It said the survey of record put the line where the fence was. It said Gordon’s bench was my personal property sitting on Mr. Wisniewski’s land, and I had fourteen days to remove it.
Christy came over at noon with a rotisserie chicken. She set it on the counter and kept her coat on.
“You humiliated him on his birthday, Mom. In front of everybody.”
“He held out a pen in front of everybody.”
“He was trying to help. In his way.” She turned her car keys over in her hand. “Uncle Burt’s all that’s left of Dad’s side. The boys love him. Can you just let it be seven feet?”
Tuesday I drove to the county building in Saginaw with the check in my purse. The woman at the Register of Deeds was kind about it. She looked up both lots all the way back to 1987.
Nothing in 1996. Nothing from Burt to Gordon, ever. She printed me both deeds anyway, a dollar a page.
“A check’s not a deed, hon,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
So I called a lawyer. The only one I knew was Marco Cisneros, who’d done Gordon’s will in about twenty minutes. He charged me two hundred and fifty dollars to sit across his desk and look at the check through his reading glasses.
“This helps,” he said. “Judges like a check. But one check, a man can call a loan, and he will.” He set it down. “What a judge likes better is a pattern. Michigan has a thing called acquiescence. Both sides treat a line as the line for fifteen years, it’s the line. So I want anything with a date on it. Anything that shows how long that garden was there and that everybody knew whose it was.”
“The garden’s gone,” I said. “He raked it flat.”
He looked at me over his glasses.
He wrote his cell number on the back of his card and slid it over.
“Then I’d want to know why he was in such a hurry,” he said.
Gordon’s truck
The stone was what Burt had over me. So I took it away from him.
A man from Gordon’s bowling league had asked me at the funeral luncheon if I’d be selling the truck. I thought it was the rudest thing anybody ever said to me.
I called him Wednesday.
He came Thursday with a cashier’s check for nine thousand dollars. I’d cleaned the truck out the night before. His sunglasses. A tire gauge. Eleven dollars in quarters in the ashtray. The church bulletin from the Sunday before he died.
I sat in it one more time before I handed over the keys. Coffee, Lava soap, the cherry cough drops he ate like candy.
The man from the bowling league moved the seat back before he even started it. I went in the house so I wouldn’t have to see the rest.
Then I rode with Christy to the monument place, because I didn’t have a way to get there anymore.
Wesley Ramos was younger than he sounded on the phone. He took my check for eighteen hundred and fifty dollars and wrote me a receipt by hand.
“We’ll cut the date this week,” he said. “Set it the Friday after, weather permitting.”
Christy didn’t say anything the whole way home. At the end of my driveway she said, “You didn’t have to sell the truck, Mom,” and I said, “Yes, I did.”
Burt was on his side of the chain-link in a lawn chair, with a can. He saw the empty spot by the garage where the truck had been for eighteen years.
“You sold his truck,” he said. “Over seven feet.”
“Over eighteen fifty,” I said.
He laughed. I went inside.
Mr. Cisneros wanted the carbon of the 1996 check, so I got the shoebox down again and took the rubber band off 1996.
Then I took the rubber band off 1995.
The rubber bands
1995 had a check to Burt in it. Seven hundred dollars. March. B. — line.
So did 1994. Seven hundred. March.
I took the rubber bands off all of them and laid the registers across the desk in a row, oldest on the left, the way Gordon would have.
1993, six hundred. 1992, six hundred. 1991, five. 1990, five. 1989, four hundred.
Every one in March. Every one B. — line, in the square printing.
Around them, the rest of our life in carbon. Christy’s braces, eighty-five a month. The furnace in ’91. A hundred and twelve dollars at Kmart the week before Christmas. The March I wanted a new couch, and Gordon said we’d see, and we didn’t.
I got out Gordon’s adding machine, the one with the paper roll, and ran them the way he did on Sunday nights, pulling the handle down after each one. The roll curled off the edge of the desk onto the floor. Eight checks, 1989 to 1996. Six thousand five hundred dollars. After June of 1996 there wasn’t one more check to Burt in thirty years of registers.
1988 was the last one in the row.
There was a check in it for four hundred, in March. And something folded small in the back cover, the way the check had been folded in 1996.
Lined paper, torn out of a spiral pad. The handwriting wasn’t Gordon’s. It slanted downhill, the way Burt’s does on birthday cards.
Gordy. Survey guy says the 7 ft is mine. $400 a year and I don’t put up a fence.
There was one more line under that.
Trina don’t need to know. B.
Trina’s kitchen
Saturday at suppertime I carried the shoebox over to their back door. I went around by the road. I wasn’t going through his gate.
Trina let me in. She had chili going. Burt was at the table in his socks, reading the paper.
I didn’t sit. I took the registers out one at a time and laid them across their kitchen table in a row, oldest on the left. Then the note from 1988, unfolded. Then the check. Then a paper from Mr. Cisneros with a blank where the filing date goes.
I squared it with two fingers.
Burt saw the note and took his reading glasses off.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Gordon’s desk.”
“That’s thirty-eight years old.” He stood up. “That’s two brothers. That’s private business between two brothers, and one of them’s dead, Eileen. You don’t get to go through a dead man’s things and…”
“It’s my desk now,” I said.
Then he talked. He talked a long time. That their dad always liked Gordy better. That Gordy got the black dirt and Burt got the clay and the old man called it fair. That a man with a union job and one kid could spare four hundred a year and a man with two kids and a layoff couldn’t, and Gordy knew it, and paid because it made him feel big. That the survey was the survey. That a judge would laugh me out of the courthouse over some tomatoes.
“Four hundred dollars,” he said. “You know what four hundred was to me in ’88? He’d write it out at that desk and hand it over the fence like he was tipping the paperboy.”
“He paid you to leave his garden alone,” I said.
“He paid me what he owed me.”
Trina had turned the burner off. She picked up the note and read it standing by the stove.
“Trina don’t need to know,” she read.
“Trina.”
“Thirty-eight years.” She laid it back down in the row where it had been. “The boat. The overtime. The fence. You told me Stanton said get those beds out before she found herself a lawyer. You told me it was so she wouldn’t have to look at them anymore.”
“It’s my land,” Burt said. “My name’s on it.”
“Our names,” Trina said. “Both of them. And I’m not signing that agreement, and I’m not going into any courtroom to say that isn’t your handwriting.”
Burt looked at me. His face had gone a color I’d only seen on him once, at their father’s funeral.
“You’d do this,” he said. “To family. Over dirt.”
“I sold his truck,” I said. “I’ll file Monday.”
He looked at Trina. She was already at the phone on the wall.
“Then I’ll call the fence men myself,” she said. “It’s on my card too.”
The cedar boards
The stone went in on a Friday. Both dates. Under them, a tomato vine cut in the granite, which I paid extra for and would again. Christy came and held my arm. Trina came by herself and stood at the back. Burt didn’t come.
The fence men moved the chain-link back to the old line the next week. They left the gate on his side. I don’t care about the gate.
Burt parks facing the road now. Trina waves from her kitchen window when his car’s gone.
There’s an oil spot by the garage where the truck used to sit. I drive Christy’s old Buick. She says I can keep it. She came over the Saturday after with Jeremiah and the boys and a drill, and nobody had to ask her.
I was eating toast over the kitchen sink.
Out the window, Jeremiah was pulling orange string from the corner of my garage across to the mailbox post. The cedar boards were laid out on the grass in the order Gordon had built them, the screws still in. The bench was back where it goes.
Ryker held up his end of the string and yelled at the house.
“Grandma, is this your side?”
I went out in my slippers.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody whose husband kept every piece of paper.
Family secrets and old wounds have a way of resurfacing – read the story of a grandfather whose photo came down after a wedding and the husband who unfolded a list with only one name left. For another story about a hard-won possession being treated like someone else’s, see the man who poured soda on a beloved truck.
