One of those afternoons I found a card in my mailbox from neighbors three streets over, unsigned and kind. It said our trees were the reason they walked their dog past our house every evening in the fall. Hannah put the card on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a strawberry.
That same week Karen's letter count against us reached a number I could recite without opening the folder anymore. I had begun sorting the letters by subject, bins, plantings, parking, and now the growing section marked trees. The tree section was thickest, though the trees had changed the least of anything.
I photographed each trunk from the street, each canopy from the corner, and the sight lines in both directions at noon. I photographed the unobstructed stop sign, the clear crosswalk, and the empty space beneath the high branches over the sidewalk. Hannah backed up the photographs to a drive at her sister's house.
When I told Mrs. Delgado what we were doing, she approved with the briskness of a woman who had buried two husbands and three bureaucracies. She showed me her own camera screen and the small red light that meant it was always watching her stretch of street. Keep copies elsewhere, she advised me, always elsewhere.
She warned me plainly that Karen was no longer merely fining me toward compliance, as she had done with others. She said the language had changed from correction to removal, and language, in her old office, always changed first. I nodded as if I believed the worst could still be negotiated away.
Walter warned me too, in his way, while pretending to inspect the level on his rehabilitated mailbox post one morning. He said people who talk about emergencies are usually tired of asking permission for what they want. He advised me to park my truck where the driveway met the trees.
Sam warned me while helping me carry a bag of mulch from my car to the maple beds one Saturday. He said Karen had asked him, at his own mailbox, whether my trees had ever dropped anything near his children. He told her no, and she had written something down anyway.
Mrs. Jimenez warned me by pressing a plate of food into Hannah's hands and speaking rapidly to her in Spanish and English mixed together. The gist, once Hannah translated the parts I had missed, was that a woman who counted flowers would not stop at counting branches above a yard. We ate the food gratefully and worried through the whole meal in silence together at our table.
Even my mother, who lived an hour away and knew none of these people, heard the change in my voice on the phone. She asked whether the trees were safe, in the tone she once used about a childhood fever. I told her they were standing, which was true and not the same as safe.
I began sleeping badly in those weeks, waking at sounds that resolved into the refrigerator, the wind, or nothing identifiable at all. Chainsaws from a distant yard on a Saturday could pull me out of a chair before I understood why. Hannah watched me learn flinching and said nothing unkind about it.
At work I made small mistakes, transposed numbers, and had to apologize to a customer I had known for years. My supervisor asked whether everything was all right at home, in the careful tone of a good man. I said we had a dispute with our homeowners association, which sounded too small.
US DRAMA
That smallness was part of the trap Karen built, because from outside it looked like leaves, letters, and a neighborhood argument. From inside it felt like watching a slow hand reach toward the oldest living part of my family. Nobody at work had a form for that kind of fear.
I considered, seriously, whether hiring a lawyer over trees would make me ridiculous in my own eyes forever afterward. Hannah closed that question one night by setting the folder in front of me and opening it to the remediation letter. She said ridiculous was cheaper than regret, and she was right.
We got the name of a lawyer from a coworker, though we had not yet called when the pace changed again. Karen stopped sending letters for nine days, and the silence felt worse than the paper ever had before. Silence from her office was not peace, we learned, only weather changing direction.
During those nine days Cody's trucks were seen twice at the far end of our street in the early mornings. Mrs. Delgado noted the times, seven-ten and six-fifty, because her camera caught the second pass and her curtains caught the first. Neither truck stopped, and neither crew did any visible work nearby.
Walter said the trucks were probably servicing the common strip beyond the cul-de-sac, which was possible and even reasonable on its face. He said it while looking at my trees, though, and his voice gave the reasonable explanation very little support. We stood there until the school bus came and settled the moment.
One evening I walked the east line slowly, touching each trunk the way my father had on the day we bought the place. Five oaks, four red maples, nine living witnesses to nearly everything my family had been in that place. I counted them like a prayer and came up with the same number.
I checked the low oak limb where the children's swing had hung, still bearing the faint polished mark of rope. I checked the sentinel for storm damage, the second maple for fungus, and the back oak for standing water at its base. Everything I knew how to check told me the trees were sound.
Hannah joined me with two mugs of tea and stood with me under the maples in the falling dark. She said that if Karen wanted a fight about beauty, history, and common sense, we had all three on our side. I believed her completely and feared, completely, that none of those things stopped machinery.