Garnet came over in March to talk about the fence. The no-contact order covered Sheryl, not him, but he cleared the visit through both lawyers anyway, which told me most of what I needed to know about Garnet. He wanted to fix the gap. He'd build a little gate there, he said, cedar, with a latch, so the roses would have something proper to climb and so nobody would have to walk through a broken fence again. He'd pay for it. I said I'd split it with him. We argued about that for a while and he won. He also brought a roll of new screen and fixed the low torn corner on his own back porch, by the downspout, while I watched from my side, and when he was done he stood back and looked at it and said, "Well. That's the end of an era." Then he went into his workshop and came out an hour later with a second owl box, beautifully made, with a three-inch hole, and asked if I'd like to put it up on the other post for next year.
When the den under the shed was finally empty that spring, the wildlife office said we could seal it. Before we did, Garnet and I lay on our stomachs in the wet grass with a flashlight and a rake and pulled out what Marigold had left behind. A black satin slip, very much the worse for wear. Two other things, which Garnet took, folded into a grocery bag without comment, and which I never saw again. Four mismatched gardening gloves. A tennis ball. A baby's sock. One of Pippa's hair scrunchies, pink, which explained a long-standing domestic mystery. And a small knitted wool hat in faded blue, with a tag sewn inside that said, in tiny careful embroidery, H.E.
Garnet held it in his big hands for a long time.
"She lost this," he said. "Hildur. Must be fifteen years ago. She looked everywhere. She thought she'd left it at church."
He took it home.
I don't know what he told Sheryl. I don't know if he told her anything.
What I know is that a week later Rhoda called to say that Sheryl's lawyer had an envelope for me, and wanted to know whether I'd accept it. I said I would. It came in a larger envelope with a lawyer's cover note clipped to it. Not typed, like the apology the court had required, which had come through Rhoda in December and said everything it was supposed to say. This one was handwritten, in that round, confident president's script, slightly less confident than I remembered, and it was addressed to Mr. Overbeck and Pippa.
I haven't opened it.
I'm not sure why. It's on my kitchen counter, held down by one of the wooden clothespins somebody left on my porch that October, next to the stack of Owl Hours data sheets my students turned in this week. Pippa asks me about it every few days. Some days I think I'm waiting until I'm sure I won't be angry when I read it. Some days I think I'm waiting until I'm sure I won't forgive her too easily. Some days I think I'm just waiting for the roses.
Pinecone laid four eggs last week. The kids are taking bets on hatching dates. Marigold hasn't been seen since November, though there's a gray fox on the trail camera at the edge of the wetland some nights that walks the way she walked, and Pippa insists it's her.
And every morning, around ten after six, a woman in a tracksuit comes walking down Kestrel Court, without a visor now, and slows down at the corner of my lot, at the new cedar gate with the pale pink canes just starting to leaf out across it. Some mornings I'm already out there with my coffee. She doesn't look at me, and I don't look at her, not directly.
But she slows down. And I stay where I am. And neither of us, so far, has walked away first.