Backyard Score

*This one's for the slow burns that start with an argument and end with a grin. Thanks for reading something that takes its time getting to the good part I hope the tease was worth the payoff.*

I woke up on the porch swing with my laptop warm on my thighs and a headache sitting behind my eyes like a tenant who won't pay rent.

Nine a.m. I'm Theresa Hendricks. I'm forty-four. I write cozy mysteries for a living, which means I spend my days inventing murders in small towns and my nights living through actual hostility in a cul-de-sac. Oakhaven is supposed to be quaint. Hemlock Court is supposed to be peaceful. Somebody lied to me at the closing.

The vote was last night. Seven to two. Beverly Taft's modern fence plan got approved by the architectural review committee, and Patty Goodwin, our HOA president and retired school principal, let it happen with the serene smile of a woman who has seen a hundred budget meetings go down in flames and has decided that flames are fine.

I said no. Elsie Wilkins said no. Everyone else said yes.

"Majority rules," Patty said, in her principal voice. The one that makes grown adults sit up straight.

I drank my coffee and thought uncharitable thoughts. My garden has been on the neighborhood tour twice. Twice. Beverly Taft moved in eleven months ago, hired a crew to rip out a perfectly good boxwood hedge, and put in a "modern patio" that looks like a parking lot with ambitions. Gravel. Steel edging. Three ornamental grasses that she talks about like they're her children.

Now she wants to replace the shared fence. The old wooden one. The one with character, with warping, with twenty years of climbing jasmine that I planted myself.

Her plan won. Sight lines, she called it. Horizontal slats. Some kind of cedar. I stopped listening after "horizontal" because I was busy composing the argument I should have made out loud instead of the one I made in my head at two in the morning.

Around ten, the power tools started.

Of course they did. She's efficient. I'll give her that. She's the kind of woman who gets a permit approved and starts measuring the same week. Beverly's a landscape architect, forty-seven, and she treats every project as a meticulously planned campaign with better plants.

I went around to the side yard with my mug, still in my robe, hair doing whatever it wanted. Very dignified. Very "local author."

She was out there in work gloves and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, driving little wooden stakes along the property line with a rubber mallet. Tap, tap, tap. Each stake a small declaration of war.

"Morning," she said, without looking up.

"You couldn't have waited a week?"

"I could have." Tap. "I didn't want to."

Well. Okay then.

I stood there, an idiot, my coffee in hand. Through the gaps in the old fence slats I could see her in slices. Forearm. Shoulder. The line of her jaw when she straightened up. Which is a strange thing to notice about a neighbor, and I've been noticing it for eleven months, and I've been telling myself it's because she's just very present. She fills a yard. That's all.

She glanced through the slats and caught me looking. Didn't smile. Just held it a second, then went back to her stakes.

"Jasmine comes down," she said.

"That jasmine took four years to establish."

"Four years of choking my hydrangeas." Tap. Another stake. "You're a generous neighbor in every other way, Theresa. I've seen you carry Elsie's groceries in twice. Let me have the jasmine."

"Let me have the fence."

"Dead lost." She straightened, pushed her gloves down with her teeth, which was unfair and I resented it. "That fence is rot. I found termites. Actual termites. You want termites, keep the fence. I'll even leave you a vial."

"You're enjoying this."

"A little." And this is what annoyed me most. She said it honestly. No smugness. Just flat admission, like the weather. "You're fun to argue with. Nobody on this street argues. They just seethe in their garages."

"We are not friends."

"Didn't say we were." She picked up her tape measure. "Your headache's showing, by the way. You get that little crease."

I put my hand to my forehead. She laughed, one short bark, and went back to measuring, and I went back inside to be furious somewhere with a chair.

Elsie came over at noon. She's fifty-five, retired florist, lives across the street, and she is the finest gossip instrument this neighborhood has ever produced. She brought nothing, which is how you know a visit is official.

"So," she said, settling into my kitchen chair like it owed her rent. "Beverly's fencing."

"You watched the meeting. You voted no with me."

"I voted no because the jasmine was lovely." She examined her nails. "I'm here about you."

"There's no me."

"Theresa." Elsie has raised three children and buried two husbands, and she does not waste syllables. "You came out of that side yard looking like you'd been caught stealing. And you've mentioned her hands in print three times this year."

"I have not."

"Your group newsletter. The gardener character with the 'capable forearms.' The one in March with the 'surprisingly gentle grip on the trowel.'" She raised an eyebrow at me. "People notice, honey. Writers especially."

They were fictional women. Adult women, one of them a PI in Savannah. Completely unrelated.

Before I could say any of that out loud, Patty Goodwin's sedan pulled into my drive. Fifty-one, silver bob, still walks like she's about to announce a fire drill. She came up the porch steps two at a time.

"Theresa. Good, you're home." She did not sit. Patty never sits at the start of anything. "I'm doing rounds. There's a tension, and I'd like to defuse it before it gets to the newsletter stage."

Elsie and I exchanged a look. Too late, Patty.

"Here's my thought." Patty held up one finger, principal style. "You two are going to disagree about that fence for six months, minimum, and everyone else on this court is going to hear about it at every function until we all die. So. Dinner. You and Beverly, one evening, neutral territory, no fence talk for the first hour. Break bread. Come out human beings."

"Dinner," I said.

"With Beverly Taft."

"Shared dinner, shared dispute, resolved like neighbors." Patty smiled her meeting smile. "I'll even pay for the takeout. HOA discretionary fund. Don't ask me which line item."

"She'll say no," I said.

Patty's phone was already out. She typed with both thumbs, fast as a teenager, and I heard the little whoosh of it sending before I could form an objection.

Thirty seconds later her phone dinged.

"She said yes," Patty announced, looking almost startled. "Said, quote, 'tonight, if Theresa's buying.'"

The traitor.

Elsie stood up, satisfied as a cat. "Wear the green blouse," she said on her way out. "It does things."

It does nothing, I told the empty kitchen. It's a blouse.

Then I went upstairs, stood in front of my closet for eleven minutes like a woman with no spine, and texted Beverly.

7 o'clock, my porch, I typed. I'm making pasta. It's a dinner, not a negotiation.

Three dots. Then: Bring your arguments. I like them warm.

I looked at that message too many times. I put on the green blouse. I told myself the whole way down the stairs that this was about fence permits and neighborhood peace, and the version of me that noticed Beverly's hands through the fence slats could sit quietly in the back row where she belonged.

She wasn't buying it either.

The headache lasted until about two. Then I did what any professional woman does with an afternoon she can't use. I went out to sulk at my roses.

They needed water anyway. That's my story. The Mr. Lincoln hybrid teas along the back fence, the ones that got me on the neighborhood tour twice. I earned those roses. Nobody gets on a garden tour with a gravel pit and three tufts of grass.

The hose has a habit. The sprayer sticks. You have to squeeze the handle past a certain resistance and then it goes from a polite shower to a fireman's fantasy with no middle setting. I'd learned this. I'd adapted. I watered the way you pet a cat you don't fully trust.

The back gate creaked.

Beverly Taft came through it like she owned it. Work boots, canvas gloves tucked in her back pocket, a clipboard under one arm. My back gate. Her side of the fence, technically, but the gate itself is mine and I'd die on that hill.

"You can't just walk through someone's gate," I said.

"Your gate's on the property line. I checked the survey." She held up the clipboard like a warrant. "Also, your hose is on my side. It's been on my side all afternoon. It's tangled around my steel edging."

"It's around the roses."

"It's four feet into my patio." She started toward it. "I'm moving it."

"Beverly, don't. The sprayer sticks, you have to..."

She picked it up and squeezed.

Full blast. Direct hit. Center mass.

I want to describe the moment accurately. The spray caught her square in the chest, knocked the clipboard out of her hand, and she did a kind of quarter turn, arms out, taking it across the whole front of her like she was being baptized against her will. I had my hand on the tap. I shut it off in maybe two seconds. It felt like a geological era.

We stared at each other.

Her hair was flat to her skull. Her shirt clung to her in a way that left nothing about the sports bra situation to the imagination. Water dripped off her chin.

"You," she said.

"The sprayer sticks," I said. "I was telling you."

"You were telling me while I was walking toward it."

"In hindsight, I should have led with that."

She looked down at herself. Water pooled off the hem of her shirt and tapped the gravel. Then she did something I didn't expect. She laughed. Not a bark this time. A real one, bent over, hands on knees, the kind that comes out of people when they've been startled into honesty.

"You should see your face," she gasped.

"My face? You just got fire hosed in my yard."

"Your yard." She straightened up, wringing out her shirt over the gravel. "I came over here to lodge a grievance and your roses assaulted me."

"The roses had nothing to do with it. That was a hose acting alone."

I don't know when I started laughing too. It's possible I never stopped from the moment the spray hit. There's a kind of tension that only breaks one way, and we'd both been carrying three days of it. She was soaked to the skin in my backyard and she was still laughing, and the clipboard was floating in her ornamental grass, and something in my chest came loose.

"Okay," she said, catching her breath. "Okay. Truce. This is a truce."

"It's not a truce until you admit the patio's ugly."

"It's not ugly, it's contemporary, and no. Truce stands anyway." She shivered. It was seventy-five degrees out, but soaked is soaked. "I need a towel or I need to walk home wet, and one of those options ends up in the newsletter."

"Elsie would have it illustrated by Thursday," I admitted. "Come on. Porch. Towel."

She hesitated one second at my gate, which I noted. Then she came.

I got her the good towel, the thick gray one, not the threadbare guest towels I keep for people I don't like. She was wringing out her shirt on the porch steps when I remembered the cooler.

I keep a cooler by the grill. Old habit. In it, among other things, a bottle of rosé I'd been chilling since roughly the Hope Diamond. I brought it out with two glasses.

"Water's not going to fix this," I said, holding up the bottle. "Wine might."