The Neighbor Who Took My Harvest

The morning I found the garden empty, I stood at the back door in Gene’s old canvas jacket and I could not make my legs carry me down the steps. I was sixty years old and I had buried my husband eleven days before, and I had spent every one of those eleven days telling myself I could still walk out to those rows and put my hands in the dirt he had worked for thirty-nine years and feel like he was somewhere close. That was the thing I had left. Not the money, because there was not much. Not the little white house on Sumac Street. The garden. The two long acres of it that ran back from our fence line toward the tree line, where Gene had grown sweet corn and pole beans and half-runners and butternut squash and, down the center row like a spine holding the whole thing up, his tomatoes.

That morning the rows were bare.

Not picked. Not harvested the honest way, one basket at a time, the way Gene taught our grandkids to do it, twisting the fruit so the vine did not tear. The plants had been ripped. Cages knocked flat. The tall stakes he cut himself from cedar were lying in the dirt at angles, and the vines hung off them like something had been in a hurry and did not care what it broke. There were green tomatoes smashed in the path where whoever it was had dropped them and stepped on them and kept going. The corn was snapped at the stalk. The bean trellis was pulled down into a tangle.

I want to tell you I screamed. I did not. I made a sound I did not know I had in me, low, and I sat down right there on the concrete step in my dead husband’s jacket, and I looked out at two acres of nothing.

I knew who did it before I finished sitting down. I want to be honest about that too, because later people asked me how I could be so sure, and the truth is I had been sure for two days already, since the afternoon I caught her the first time.

Her name is Tammy. She lives on the other side of our east fence, in the tall gray house that her husband Rick remodeled about six years ago, the one with the composite deck and the two big trucks and the above-ground pool they take down every October. Tammy and I had been neighbors for eleven years. We were never close. She was maybe fifty, always busy, always with some new project, and she had a way of looking over the fence at Gene’s garden that I had noticed for years without letting myself name it. It was not admiration. It was the look a person gets when they think something is being wasted on the wrong people.