The Apple Tree My Neighbor Cut Down

He shrugged, actually shrugged, beer sloshing in the can. “Look, it’s just a tree, Joyce. It’ll grow back. Trees do that.”

Apple trees do not simply grow back once you cut them off at the base, not the way you’re picturing, and even if new growth ever came up from that root ball it would take another fifty years to be anything at all, and none of us in that conversation would live to see it, and he knew that, and he said it anyway, easily, the way you’d tell a child their broken toy could probably be fixed with tape.

His wife Amber appeared behind him in the doorway in a bathrobe, arms crossed, and she looked at me with an expression I can only describe as bored. Not angry, not defensive. Bored, the way you look at a telemarketer who has called at dinnertime for the third night in a row.

“We did try to be considerate about it,” Amber said. “We had the crew come while you were away so it wouldn’t be some big scene in front of you. We figured that was kinder.”

I actually laughed, one short ugly bark of a laugh, because I could not process what she was telling me. They had planned it. They had waited for me to leave town, for my sister to nearly die on an operating table three hundred miles from here, so that they could take a chainsaw to fifty years of my family’s history without having to watch my face while they did it, and they wanted credit for the timing. They wanted me to be grateful that they’d been sneaky about it instead of simply asking me first.

“You could have called me,” I said. “You could have knocked on my door and asked. I would have told you no, and you would have had your answer, and that tree would still be standing.”

“And we’d still be sitting in the dark half the day,” Chad said. “Look, I get that it’s sentimental to you. But it’s my property now too, Joyce, in the sense that it affects my property value, my sunlight, my investment. I’ve got a contractor coming Thursday. I wasn’t going to hold up a twenty two thousand dollar pool deck for a tree.”

Twenty two thousand dollars. He said the number like it settled something, like it was simply obvious that a dollar figure on his side of the fence outweighed whatever my grandmother’s tree was worth on mine, because mine couldn’t be priced the same way, mine wasn’t on anybody’s invoice.

I want to tell you I said something devastating in that moment, something that shut the door on the whole conversation and sent them both slinking back inside ashamed. I didn’t. I stood there in my work clothes, exhausted from an eight hour drive and a week at my sister’s bedside, and I said, “You had no right,” one more time, quietly, and then I turned around and walked back to my own dark house because I did not trust myself to stay another minute without saying something I couldn’t take back.