A long time ago I wrote that our immediate neighbors patched up the fence passing behind our back yard so that the very small man across the street could no longer take the much shorter cut through our yards to his little restaurant next to the very nearby grocery megapolis. My post ended as follows:
Now the patriarchal figure worries. It wasn’t his fence to patch–and it wasn’t the neighbor boys’ fence to patch, either. But he had greeted the very small man taking the shortcut, and so the likely inference by the very small man would be that the patriarchal figure knew about, did not like, and was responsible for barring his quick, efficient means of getting to work.
Which couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Today the very small man sped over in his car and practically skidded to a stop at the front of our house. I had just finished sweeping the remains of a youth group wood cutting service project out of my truck bed, preparing to haul my classroom furniture to my new school.
“Are you leaving?” the very small man asked, indicating our For Sale sign. I told him of our plans.
“What price are you asking for your house?”
He came inside for a tour, and soon we found ourselves at the upstairs back window, facing the still-patched fence just as I had been when I took this photo so long ago.
“I could probably get to work in three minutes, from here,” he said, “walking.”
“Yes–probably faster,” I said. “That isn’t our fence back there, but the neighbor boys go through a broken place just behind their shed. That would be a short commute.”
He chuckled, and then said he needed some advice. Apparently a builder he had paid to tile the restaurant floor had “traded jobs” with another builder, and the new builder was demanding payment for putting down the tile, for which, the very small man says, he had already paid.
I asked him if he had an attorney.
“I should have gotten one back in May when this first came up,” he said, “but I didn’t, and if we don’t pay them in a few days, they’re going to change the locks on our doors.”
In a phone book I found the number for a business law attorney. He scrawled the number onto the back of our realtor’s business card, told me about a $500 bicycle he had obtained using Marlboro Miles he clipped from discarded cartons along the road (“I don’t smoke,” he said) and $110 (plus shipping), shook my hand, and left.
