The Neighbor Who Took My Harvest

Two days before I found the rows bare, I had come home from the funeral home, where I had gone to pick up the guest book and the leftover programs, and I had heard the fence rattle. I came around the side of the house and there was Tammy, halfway over our fence, one leg on the top rail, a plastic tote bag in each hand already heavy with our tomatoes. She had on gardening gloves. She had brought gloves.

“Tammy,” I said.

She did not fall off the fence the way a person startled might. She just looked at me and then finished coming over, dropped down into our yard on my side, and set the bags down like she had every right to.

“Oh, Glenda,” she said. “I did not think you were home.”

That was the whole apology. I did not think you were home.

I told her those were Gene’s tomatoes. I told her our grandkids ate off that garden, that the church food pantry took our extra every August, that Gene had grown that center row from seed he saved himself for thirty years. I heard my own voice going high and thin and I could not stop it.

She listened to about half of it. Then she picked her bags back up.

“He’s not going to eat them now, is he,” she said. “They will just rot on the vine. You cannot even keep up your own yard, hon. Everybody can see that.”

She was not wrong that the yard had gone rough. I had not mowed since the week Gene got his diagnosis. But she said it the way you would slap someone, and then she stepped back over the fence into her own yard with two bags of our tomatoes and told me over her shoulder that grief was making me hysterical and I should lie down.

I stood in the yard and shook. Rick came out on their deck with a beer and watched the whole thing and did not say one word. He just watched, the way he watched everything, like a man at a ballgame who does not have money on it either way.

I did not call anybody. I did not know who I would call. What do you say, my neighbor took a bag of tomatoes. I went inside and I cried and I slept badly and I told myself she had gotten what she wanted and it was over.

Two mornings later the whole garden was gone.

So no, I did not have to wonder who did it. The only thing I wondered, sitting on that step, was how a person does that to a widow eleven days out and then goes inside and makes her coffee.

I am going to tell you what I did about it, and I am going to tell you the whole thing, because a lot of people in this town heard a piece of it and got the piece wrong. Some of them thought I lost my mind. For about a week, I let them think it, because I needed them to.