The Apple Tree My Neighbor Cut Down

I was standing near the front with Sharon, who had insisted on coming even though her doctor probably wouldn’t have loved the idea, and I watched heads turn, one after another, toward where Chad and Amber were standing near the pancake breakfast table. Chad’s face went through about four different colors in the space of ten seconds. Amber’s mouth actually fell open, and I don’t think it was on my account. I think it was the first time she was hearing about the furniture money too, the part where he’d planned to profit off a stranger’s grief on top of causing it.

Carl’s camera was going the whole time. That photo ran on the front page of the paper that Thursday: Logan holding up his phone on the courthouse steps, my face in the crowd with my hand pressed over my mouth, and behind us, slightly out of focus but unmistakably present, Chad standing frozen with a paper plate of pancakes going cold in his hand.

Nobody booed. Nobody needed to. A few people near Chad simply started walking away from him, drifting toward the food trucks, the way you’d step back from something you didn’t want near you anymore. A woman I recognized from the garden club walked directly up to Amber and said, loud enough for a dozen people to hear, “You knew about the historical society tag on that tree before you cut it, and you let him laugh about her crying at church? At church, Amber?” Amber didn’t have an answer. She just stood there holding her own paper plate.

The mayor, to her credit, stepped back up to the microphone after a moment and said the historical society would be looking into whether the county’s tree ordinance had any teeth for cases like this going forward, and that regardless of what came of it, this town remembered who planted things and who tore them down, and that seemed like the kind of thing worth saying out loud once a year if nothing else.

I would like to tell you the county fined Chad an enormous sum and it felt like justice, but that isn’t quite how it went. The tree ordinance, as it turned out, mostly covered trees on public land, and my grandmother’s tree had always sat on private property, so there was no clean legal hammer waiting to come down on him, no matter how much some part of me had wanted one. That’s not really the point of what happened, though, and it took me a little while to understand that myself.

What happened instead was slower and, I think, worse for him. The real estate broker whose office he’d been courting for weeks stopped returning his calls after Founders Day. Two separate families on our street who’d been friendly with Chad and Amber, who used to have them over for cookouts, quietly stopped inviting them. Someone started a joke around town, gentle by our standards but pointed all the same, about the new hot tub having the best view in the county now that all the shade was gone, and Chad hearing it repeated back to him at the hardware store by a man he’d never even met. Amber told Nora, weeks later, almost in tears, that she hadn’t fully understood what Chad had told the crew that day until she heard it played back on the courthouse steps in front of everyone she’d been trying to make friends with since they moved in, and that she was the one who eventually told him the deck needed a hedge or a fence between our yards, because she couldn’t stand looking at that hot tub either anymore.