The Balcony Over My Backyard

But then I looked up past him at that balcony still hanging over my grass, throwing its hard shadow across the spot where my chair goes, and I thought about the crickets, and the quiet I had paid for in a currency he would never understand, and I knew there was not a number he could say that would make me sell it.

“No,” I said.

“Come on. Name a price.”

“There isn’t one,” I said. “You built it over my land without asking and without a permit because you figured I’d roll over. I’m not rolling over. Take it down. All of it, back to your side of the line. That’s the only thing that fixes this.”

He stared at me. The salesman was gone. What was left was just a man who had gambled on my silence and lost.

“You’re really gonna make me tear it down,” he said. “Over a few feet.”

“You made you tear it down,” I said. “The day you built it. I’m just the guy who noticed.”

The sound of it coming down

They took it down in December.

Not by choice, not really. Between the county’s order and my lawyer’s thirty-day letter and a preliminary injunction my lawyer had teed up and made sure the Carters knew was coming, they ran out of walls to sell. A crew showed up one cold gray Tuesday, the same kind of crew that had thrown it up in a week, and they spent two days taking it apart. I did not stand out there and watch, because I am not the kind of man who needs to watch another man’s mistake get carted off in a dumpster. But I heard it. The whine of the saws, the clang of the railing sections going into the truck, the flat knock of decking boards being pried up and thrown down. I heard every bit of it from my kitchen, and I will not pretend it did not sound like justice.

When they were done, the back of the Carter house had a set of second-story sliding doors that opened onto nothing but air again. A short railing across them now, so nobody walked out and fell twenty feet, but no balcony. Nothing reaching over my fence. Nothing hanging over my grass.

And the shadow was gone.

The first clear afternoon after they finished, I dragged my chair out to the middle of the yard, to that patch of grass where the sun always falls, and I sat down in it. The light came down through the maple the way it always had, before any of it, unbroken, all the way to the ground. I sat there a long time. Dave came over with the two folding chairs and the thermos, and he looked up at the blank back wall of the house behind mine, and he did not say anything smart for once. He just handed me a cup of coffee and sat down.

The Carters paid for the survey in the end, and my lawyer’s fees, as part of the settlement, so the whole thing cost me nothing but the patience it took. They also, I heard later, had to pay the county a fine for building without a permit, and had to hire an engineer and pull real permits to fix a couple of other corners they had cut on that rushed house. I did not go looking for that information. It found me the way things do out here, over back fences and thermoses.

I do not know if Travis learned anything. I doubt it. Men who are always selling rarely stop long enough to learn. But he learned one thing, at least, whether he understood it or not. He learned that quiet is not the same as weak. A man can be soft-spoken and slow to anger and still be completely, permanently unwilling to be run over. Those things live together just fine. They have lived together in me my whole life.