Gary stopped troweling. He looked at the survey in my hand. Then he looked at the orange stakes in the grass behind him. The nearest one was three feet behind his new post, back toward his own house.
He said the stakes could be wrong.
I told him the surveyor was licensed by the state, and the survey was filed with the county, and he was welcome to hire his own and pay for it. I told him if his surveyor found a different line, I would pay for the fence myself.
The neighbor with the dog, Mrs. Pham, stepped up on the curb. She said, Gary, you moved my garden border in 2019 too. I let it go.
Four years of being the guy obsessed with six inches of grass, and one sheet of paper from the county showed it was eleven feet.
Gary did not hire his own surveyor. He pulled the fence post out that afternoon, still wet.
But I did not want a war with my neighbor. I had seen what that does to a street. So the next weekend I knocked on his door.
His wife, Linda, answered. She invited me in. Gary was at the kitchen table looking like he had not slept.
I told him I did not want to make him tear everything out. The shed corner and the planters I could live with, if we signed something that said where the real line was. But the hedges were a problem, and the concrete was a bigger one.
Linda spoke up first. She said the hedges were her idea. Gary put them in because she wanted privacy after her surgery, when she was spending a lot of time on the back patio. He kept moving them out a little each year because they kept growing wider and he did not want to lose her view.
Gary did not look up. He said he knew he was on my side of the line. He just did not know how to fix it without taking something away from her.
So we figured it out together. Gary and I dug the hedges up that fall and replanted them right on the real line. We split the cost of a proper fence behind them. Six feet tall, cedar, with a little gate in the middle so we could pass things back and forth. Gary insisted on paying sixty percent. I did not argue.
It turned out Gary was a good fence builder. Retired union carpenter. He set every post plumb to the sixteenth. I held the level and listened to stories about the forty years he spent building schools.
When it was done, we filed the agreement and the survey with the county. The line is official now.
Mrs. Pham got her garden border back too. Gary moved it himself and brought her a flat of tomato plants to apologize.
Every summer now, Linda passes a plate of cookies through the gate. Every fall, I pass back a bag of apples from my tree, which it turns out was on my side all along.
Gary says the gate was the best idea I ever had. He says fences are for property. Gates are for neighbors.