“…one more paper that proves the strip is mine,” Wade had said on the telephone, and so I agreed to meet him at the old office behind the greenhouses, where the faded sign still read Harper Garden Supply. I arrived early on a cold March morning, in my wool coat, carrying the rusted cash box that I had found beneath the potting bench. The new owners had given me a key. The office smelled of dry soil and old coffee. Wade was already there, sitting in my father chair behind the desk, a big man of seventy five in a canvas jacket, with an envelope in his hands.
My brother and I had not spoken in nine months. We had been close as children, two kids running up and down the rows of tomato starts, selling marigolds out of a wagon. Then our father passed and left the business to me and the land behind it to the business, and Wade had decided that the narrow strip along the creek, a hundred feet wide and half a mile long, had always been his. He had said so in a lawyer letter after I sold the company for nine hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. I had not slept well since.
I put the cash box on the desk. Wade glanced at it, then at me, and I saw something flicker in his expression. I opened the lid. Inside lay a one page agreement, typed on our father old Remington, dated 1989, which said in plain words that the creek strip belonged to the garden center and to no individual. It was signed by our father, by me, and by Wade. There was also a bundle of receipts, forty four of them, and a ledger page, showing that for eleven years Wade had collected rent from a contractor named Dolan who stored equipment on the strip.
A rusted cash box beneath a potting bench, a 1989 agreement typed on an old Remington, and a photograph of two children in a wagon.
“Where did you find that?” Wade asked. His voice was gruff but I heard a tremor in it. I said that I had found it under the potting bench, wrapped in a feed sack, with a note in Daddy hand telling whoever opened it to compare the two papers. Wade stared at the agreement. He ran one thick finger along the line where his own signature sat, young and confident, thirty five years old. Then he set his envelope on the desk without opening it. He said, in a small voice, “I forgot I signed that.”
I did not believe him. I think he did not believe himself. But I sat down in the visitor chair, across from my brother, and I waited. In my experience, waiting is the most underrated tool in family arguments. After a while he said that when our father fell ill, he had felt that everything had been left to me, that the strip was the one thing that might be his. He had told himself he had a claim. He had collected rent, he said, because it felt like justice. A small, crooked justice. He had spent every dollar of it on his wife medical bills.
That stopped me. I had not known. Gloria, his wife, had been ill for six years with a condition that insurance only half covered. Wade had never asked me for help. He was too proud, and I had been too busy being proud in return. I thought of the nights I had gone home to a warm kitchen while my brother sat in a hospital corridor. I reached across the desk, and I laid my hand on top of his, which was cold and rough as bark. I said, “Wade, you should have told me.”
He wept then, quietly, a big man shaking in a small chair. When he finished, I said what I had decided on the drive over. The strip belonged to the garden center, and the garden center now belonged to someone else, so there was nothing I could give him. But I could pay back the rent he had collected, to the new owners, from my own sale money, and in return they had already agreed to let him keep working the nursery part time. And I wanted him to have a share of the sale, a gift, enough to cover Gloria remaining bills.
He tried to refuse. I would not let him. I told him that our father would be ashamed of us both if we spent our last years not speaking over a piece of land neither of us could take with us. I said it with such force that he laughed, a surprised, watery laugh. Then he opened his envelope, the one he had brought. Inside was not a paper at all. It was a photograph, creased and faded, of two small children in a wagon full of marigolds, squinting into the sun.
We walked out to the creek together, the two of us, in the thin March light. The strip was a long green line of alder and willow, with the water running clear over round stones. Wade stood at the edge and pointed to a stump. He said it was where our father had built a bench in 1962, where he used to sit and eat his sandwich, and he said he had wanted to keep the land partly because he could not bear to see anyone else sit there. I said I could understand that.
In April the new owners placed a plain wooden bench on the same stump, with a small brass plate: Harper Brothers, 1962. Wade installed it himself, with a drill and a level, and I held the board. When we finished, we sat on it together, shoulder to shoulder, and unwrapped two ham sandwiches that I had made that morning. He took a bite, and chewed slowly, and looked out over the creek. “Daddy always said you put too much mustard,” he said. I said, “Daddy was wrong.” And we laughed until we had to wipe our eyes.
