Chapter 3 - The Complaint Had a Name
I learned why Cynthia was so confident when I saw Mrs. Helen Price standing at the trail entrance with a bruised wrist.
Helen lived two houses down. She brought us Christmas cookies every year and had taught Ellie to knit a crooked scarf. Now she stood beside a bench, trying to balance a paper grocery bag against her hip.
“Let me get that,” I said.
She allowed me to carry it halfway home. Then she saw the orange mark through my fence and stopped.
“Oh, Nora. They're really going to do it?”
“They say somebody slipped on the berries.”
Helen looked down at her shoes. “I sent a complaint.”
I nearly dropped the bag. “You?”
“I fell on that path two weeks ago. Right there by the storm drain. Cynthia asked me to write down what happened.”
“Did you slip on fruit?”
“There were berries around. I don't remember stepping on one.”
I wanted to tell her that difference mattered. Instead I heard myself say, “You could've called me.”
Helen's face folded. “I was embarrassed. My daughter already wants me to stop walking alone. I didn't want a fuss.”
At the corner, a boy on a bicycle rolled over a dark patch of crushed fruit. His rear tire skidded an inch, enough to make my stomach drop. He recovered and kept going, barely noticing.
Helen saw it, too. “The path does need cleaning.”
“I clean it.”
“Sometimes. It needs more than sometimes.”
She took the groceries back. That was the end of our walk.
When I told Ellie, she frowned. “You knew berries got on the path.”
“I swept them.”
“Yesterday you were at work late. I swept them.”
She said it without trying to win anything. That made it hurt worse.
I worked at the public library and covered afternoon shifts when coworkers called out. Some evenings I got home too late to see whether the trail needed attention. Danny used to keep a push broom by the gate and make jokes about being the neighborhood berry patrol. After he died, I'd kept the broom and stopped noticing how often Ellie used it.
That afternoon I hired Dana Salas, a certified arborist from the next town. She agreed to visit Wednesday morning. I also bought two bags of absorbent mulch, a stiff outdoor broom, and a bucket with a lid. None of those things made the board's notice fair. But Helen's bruised wrist was real.
After dinner, Ellie found me standing beside the trunk with the old tape measure her father had used. “You don't have to fight everybody,” she said.
“I'm fighting for the tree.”
May you like
“I know.” Ellie looked past me toward Helen's house. “Just don't make the tree the only thing you can see.”
Then she asked if I would come with her to visit Helen tomorrow and hear the whole story. I opened my mouth to say we didn't have time before the meeting. The answer on Ellie's face told me how much another refusal would cost.
