From across the fence, softer: "I really am sorry about your boots."
I wheel the mower back to the garage. Return it to its bay. Wipe the deck with a microfiber cloth. Hang the cloth on hook number seven.
The walkway daisy sways in the breeze.
I'm going to need a chisel.
The hedge wall is seven feet tall, four feet deep, and trimmed to tolerances that would make a barber weep. Boxwood. Buxus sempervirens. I planted it the week I moved in, nursed it through two droughts and a caterpillar infestation, and shaped it with hand shears because electric trimmers leave a ragged edge that only amateurs and psychopaths find acceptable.
It is not a hiding spot.
It is a privacy barrier, and I am performing a visual inspection of its eastern face, which happens to be the face that runs along the property border, which happens to provide an unobstructed sightline to her front porch.
She's sitting on the steps now. Cross-legged. The citation in both hands, held up close to her face like she's reading thefine print on a treaty. Which she should, because I spent forty minutes on those subsections. 4.2.1 through 4.2.7 outline the specific municipal codes she violated. I included footnotes.
Her lips move as she reads. She flips to page two.
There are three pages.
Her eyebrows climb. The wild hair, a storm system of brown curls held back by what appears to be a screwdriver jammed through a bun, shifts as she tilts her head. Soil streaks her left cheek. Her overalls today are orange. Not burnt orange. Not autumn orange. Traffic cone orange. The kind of orange that says I have given up on subtlety as a concept.
She reaches the penalty section. I can tell because her mouth drops open and stays open for a full four seconds. Then it closes. Then it opens again.
"Subsection 4.2.4: dispersal of non-approved organic particulate matter across neighboring property boundaries constituting a Category B environmental nuisance." She reads it aloud to no one. To the universe. To the ugly ceramic gnome squatting by her mailbox like a concussed toad. "Category B!"
She stands. The citation crumples in her fist.
Good.
She smooths it back out, reads it again.
Better.
She folds it once, twice, three times, then shoves it into the front pocket of the traffic cone overalls and disappears into the garage. The garage door is open. It's been open since yesterday. Inside: a landscape of cardboard boxes, potted plants in various stages of revolt, bags of soil stacked like sandbags before a flood, and tools hanging from absolutely nothing because she doesn't own a pegboard.
She emerges dragging a post-hole digger.
The thing is almost as tall as she is. Two steel blades at the bottom, spread like a jaw, connected by a hinge to twin woodenhandles that rise above her head. She grips both handles, hoists the digger upright, and immediately overbalances backward.
Her boots skid on the gravel path. The digger tips. She catches it, overcorrects, and the blade end swings in a wide arc that decapitates a marigold in a hanging basket.
I grip the hedge wall. The boxwood compresses under my fingers. Two years of careful shaping, and I'm denting it with my bare hands like an animal.
She hauls the digger to a patch of yard near the sidewalk. The patch is dirt. Raw, unsodded, weed-choked dirt, which is its own citation but one thing at a time. She positions the blades over the ground, raises the handles above her head, and drives the digger down.
It bounces off a root.
The handles snap back and catch her in the sternum. She doubles over, wheezes, and the digger topples sideways into what I think was once a flower bed but now resembles a mass grave for begonias.
She picks it up. Tries again. Same root. Same result, minus the sternum hit, because this time she's braced for it. The blades skitter across the packed earth and gouge a shallow trench approximately four inches to the left of where she intended.
Third attempt. She jumps onto the crossbar with both feet, using her body weight to force the blades down. They sink maybe three inches. She whoops. Actually whoops, like she's conquered a mountain and not penetrated topsoil.
Then she can't pull it back out.
She yanks. Twists. Plants one foot on the ground and heaves with her whole body, curls bouncing, face reddening, the screwdriver threatening to launch from her bun like a ballistic missile. The digger releases with a pop and she staggers back, triumphant, holding a clump of clay and root fiber aloft like a trophy.
The citation. She pulls it from her pocket. Smooths it flat against her thigh.
