The Balcony Over My Backyard

He said forever home the way some people say a word they read in a magazine. Like it meant something. I told him good luck with it. I meant it, mostly. I was not thrilled about months of construction backing up to my yard, but a man can do what he wants with the dirt he paid for. That is the deal we all sign when we buy a place next to other people. You get your square, they get theirs, and everybody keeps to their own square. I have believed that my whole life. I still do. That belief is the reason all of this happened, and it is also the reason it ended the way it did.

I went back up the ladder and finished the branch and did not think much more about it.

That was my first mistake, if you want to call it that. Not saying more. Not asking a single question. Just assuming a stranger understood the deal the same way I did.

Two months later the Hollister house was gone. Not renovated. Gone. One week it was a tidy little ranch with a dead garden, and the next it was a dirt lot behind a rented fence, and Carol’s tomato stakes were sticking up out of a dumpster like the ribs of something.

Then the framing started, and my mornings changed. Seven o’clock sharp, every day but Sunday, the nail guns started popping. Trucks idled in the street with their diesels rattling. Workers hollered measurements back and forth across the lot. There were dumpsters at the curb and ladders leaning against my mailbox post and, more than once, a stranger’s truck parked across the end of my driveway like my driveway was just part of the job site now.

None of it was a crime. I want to be fair about that. Every bit of it was the ordinary friction of somebody building a house, and I have built enough things in my life to know it makes a mess before it makes anything else. So I kept my mouth shut. I told myself construction ends. I told myself in a year I would not remember any of it.

But somewhere in there, watching the thing go up, I started to notice something that did not sit right in my chest.

The back wall of the new house was almost all glass. Floor to ceiling. Big black-framed panels, two stories of them, and every one of them aimed directly into my backyard. Not at the street. Not at their own side yard. At mine. At my maple, my grass, my lawn chair, the exact patch of shade where I had spent five years learning how to be a person again.

Dave noticed it before I said anything. We were standing on my deck one evening watching the crew pack up, and he squinted across at that wall of glass and let out a low whistle.

“That is a lot of window pointed your way,” he said.

I laughed it off. I said something like, “Guess they like trees.” But I had already felt it. The yard was starting to feel less like mine. Not because anybody had taken anything yet. Just because somebody had built a way to watch.