“People,” he said.
That was it. That was the whole answer.
I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He just kept tying the tomato plant with a strip of old bedsheet, his big knotted fingers moving slow and careful.
I figured he was giving them away to the neighbors. Or taking them to church. Or maybe just letting them rot. I didn’t ask again.
I should have.
The neighbor was a man named Brent.
Brent Hollis. He’d built the big gray house on the old Swenson lot last spring.
The Swensons had lived next door to my parents for forty years. Old Mr. Swenson taught me how to ride a bike on the gravel road between our houses. After he died, his kids sold the land to a developer. The developer sold it to Brent. And Brent tore down the Swensons’ little white farmhouse, every board of it, and built something that looked like it belonged in a magazine.
