The Wall My Neighbor Wanted Gone
Nine Days
The engineer’s name was on his truck door, but what mattered to me was the drill rig he brought, the soil probes, the level, and the folder he carried with him everywhere he walked. He spent most of a day out there, taking core samples along the length of the wall and out into Rita’s yard as far as she would let him go, which was not far, since she stood on her porch the entire time with her arms crossed, clearly unhappy that a stranger was measuring her new patio slab.
He did not say much while he worked, which is the thing about engineers that unsettled me more than anything Rita had said to me in four months. He asked a handful of pointed questions about when the pool excavation had started, how deep they had dug, and whether anyone had rerouted the drainage at the top of the slope before or after that concrete went in. I told him what I knew, which was less than I wanted to.
He told me it would take about a week and a half to get the samples analyzed and the report written up properly, and that I should hold off on making any decisions about that wall until I had it in hand. I spent those nine days doing ordinary things, running jobs, paying bills, avoiding Rita at the mailbox, while a hairline crack sat in the back of my mind the entire time like a splinter I could not quite get out.
I kept myself busy the way I always have, driving out to a job site every morning before the fog burned off the hollow, coming home every evening to a kitchen table covered in invoices instead of dinner plates most nights that week. My daughter called from college twice during that stretch, and both times I found myself talking about the wall instead of anything happening in her own life, which she gently pointed out was not like me. I told her I would explain everything once I actually understood it myself. On the Friday night of that week, half the town turned out for the football game at the high school the way it does every fall, and I sat in the bleachers next to Melissa, watching our boys lose by two touchdowns to a team from three counties over, neither of us saying much about Rita, both of us thinking about her anyway.