My neighbor, Richard Sterling, owns three car dealerships and believes the world adjusts to his preferences. For five years, I have watched him subtly shift the property line between our lots. A new retaining wall here. A row of hydrangeas there.
Every time I mentioned it, Richard would smile, clap me on the shoulder, and say, “Just improving the neighborhood, Tom.”
Last week, his landscaping crew tore up the original chain-link fence and drove wooden stakes three feet into my side of the yard, preparing for a massive brick wall. My daughter told me to let it go. I’m seventy-one, on a fixed income, and I can’t afford a surveyor or a lawyer.
But I couldn’t let it go. My father built this house. I went up to the attic to find the original property deed, digging through boxes of my dad’s old tax returns and fading photographs.
At the bottom of a rusted metal lockbox, I found the deed, dated 1974. Folded inside it was a second document, handwritten on heavy, yellowing legal paper.
It was a contract, signed by my father and Richard Sterling’s grandfather.
I adjusted my glasses, struggling to read the fading blue ink. It wasn’t a dispute over property lines. The document detailed a loan my father made to the Sterling family when their first dealership was on the verge of bankruptcy.
There was a clause at the bottom, heavily underlined by my father.
“In the event this debt is never repaid,” the clause read, “the Sterling family agrees to forfeit…”
I heard a truck pull into my driveway outside.
Two Pallets and a Burrito
It wasn’t Richard.
It was a flatbed from Hollander Masonry, backing up my driveway with that beeping that goes right into your fillings. I could see it through the attic vent. Two pallets of red brick sat shrink-wrapped on the back like a couple of fat men waiting for a bus.
I put the papers back in the lockbox. Then I took them out again, because I didn’t trust myself to leave them up there. I went down the pull-down stairs one rung at a time. The left knee. It’s always the left knee.
The driver was a kid, twenty-five maybe, Hollander shirt with the sleeves cut off, clipboard. “You Sterling?”
“No.”
“Got a drop for 418 Briar. GPS put me here.” He nodded at the stakes running down my side yard, the orange flagging tape snapping in the wind. “Guy said put it by the stakes.”
“Those stakes are in my yard.”
He looked at the clipboard like it might have an opinion. “I just drive the truck, sir.”
I asked for ten minutes. He said he could give me five and then he had to call it in. Fine. He climbed back in the cab, left the engine running, and unwrapped a gas station burrito.
I stood on my porch in my socks and read the rest of it.
In the event this debt is never repaid in full by January 1, 1985, the Sterling family agrees to forfeit the parcel at 418 Briar Road, house and land both, to Walter Pruitt or his heirs, upon written demand.
418 Briar Road. Richard’s house. The one with the three-car garage and the flagpole that’s taller than my roof.
The underlining was under house and land both. Three lines. My father pressed so hard the pen went through the paper on the second one, a little tear you could see light through. And in the margin, in his small square capitals, the same capitals he used to label every jar of screws in the basement:
GENE INSISTED. NOT ME.
The loan was nine thousand four hundred dollars. Signed Eugene R. Sterling and Walter J. Pruitt. Witnessed by Marjorie Pruitt, my mother, in her nice cursive. March 11, 1974.
The burrito kid honked. Short, polite.
I walked down the steps and told him the stakes were wrong but the address was right, and 418 had a perfectly good curb. He thought about it for maybe two seconds. Then he dropped both pallets on Richard’s curb, right in front of the mailbox, and drove off with a wave.
I’ll be honest. That was the best I’d felt in about a month.
The Man Who Never Bought Anything
You have to understand my father to understand how strange that paper was.
Walter Pruitt ran a lathe at the Fairbanks Morse plant for thirty-eight years. He drove a 1966 Rambler until 1983, when the floor rusted through and my mother put her foot down. Literally; she said she could see the road. He bought one suit in his life. He was buried in it.
Nine thousand four hundred dollars in 1974 was most of what my parents had. I did the math sitting on the porch steps. My mother had been talking about a new kitchen that year. I remember because I was twenty-one and home on leave, and she had a Sears catalog with the pages folded down. Harvest gold appliances. She never got them. The kitchen I’m sitting in right now is the same yellow Formica, the same cabinet door that never latches unless you lift it.
Gene Sterling lived next door at 418 from 1969 on. Big laugh, cigars, a Buick he swore he’d sold six times. He opened Gene’s Auto on Route 9 in 1971: gravel lot, a trailer for an office, a string of plastic pennants. Sterling Motors came later, after Gene, when Richard’s father Dale put his name on it. Now there are three of them and a jingle on the radio I can’t get out of my head. Drive a Sterling, it’s a sterling deal.
I never heard one word about a loan. Not at Thanksgiving, not at my father’s funeral, not ever.
The lockbox had more in it. A Sears receipt for a Craftsman push mower, 1981, $219.95. A Polaroid of a beagle nobody in my family ever owned, as far as I know. And an index card, the lined kind, with a column of dates and dollar amounts in two different handwritings.
$100. $100. $100. April 1974. May 1974. Every month. My father’s numbers and Gene’s numbers, trading off, like they’d sat at a kitchen table together and taken turns with the pen.
It ran through October 1979. Total paid: $6,200.
Then it stopped. No more lines. Under the last entry my father had written BAL. $3,200 and drawn a box around it.
I called my daughter.
Lisa’s forty-four and a charge nurse in Columbus, and she answers the phone like she’s already halfway out of the room. I read her the clause. She was quiet for a second.
“Dad, that’s fifty years old.”
“I know how old it is.”
“You can’t take a man’s house over a fifty-year-old IOU.” Then, away from the phone: “Greg, no, the blue one.” Back to me. “Call legal aid. Seriously. Don’t go over there and wave it at him.”
I said I wouldn’t.
I did think about it.
Legal Aid Has Hold Music Now
The county legal aid office got me in on Tuesday at 10:40. The woman’s name was Carol Mendoza. She had a cardigan with a cat hair problem and a desk covered in other people’s trouble, and she read the whole contract twice without saying anything.
Then she slid it back across the desk.
“Mr. Pruitt, I’m going to be straight with you. This is dead.”
“Dead.”
“The statute of limitations on a written contract ran out when I was in grade school. Even if it hadn’t, a court would look at forty years of your father never making a demand and call it waived. Nobody’s losing a house over this.” She tapped the paper. “It’s a nice piece of family history. I’d frame it.”
I’d brought a sugar packet from the diner in my shirt pocket, I don’t know why, and I’d been folding it into smaller and smaller squares the whole time she talked. It was about the size of a postage stamp by then. I put it on her desk like I was paying for something.
I said thank you and started to stand up.
“Can I ask you one thing,” she said. “Why’d the payments stop?”
“I don’t know. Gene died in ’83. Maybe he got sick.”
“He stopped in ’79, though. Four years before.” She leaned back. “Your father kept that card in a lockbox with his deed. He drew a box around the balance. That’s a man who cares where every dollar went. And then he just let three thousand two hundred go? For the rest of his life?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“Go to the recorder’s office,” she said. “Basement of the county building. Ask them to pull the chain of title on 418. Old guys settled things with land all the time. Sometimes it’s in there and nobody’s looked in fifty years.”
Pam Charges a Dollar a Page
The recorder’s office smells like toner and floor wax. There was one woman behind the counter, Pam, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a Garfield calendar still turned to March.
I gave her the address. She typed for a while. Hummed. Typed some more.
“Okay. 418 Briar. You’ve got the Sterlings buying it in ’69… refinance in ’77… here’s Dale inheriting in ’83, here’s the transfer to Richard in 2012.” She scrolled. “Oh. Huh.”
“What.”
“There’s a quitclaim in here. February 1980. Eugene and Lorraine Sterling to Walter J. Pruitt.” She squinted. “A strip. Twenty-two feet wide, running the full length of the east line.”
I made her say it again.
“Twenty-two feet. Consideration: three thousand two hundred dollars and other good and valuable consideration.” She looked at me over the glasses. “That’s you? Pruitt?”
“That was my father.”
“Well, it’s recorded. Recorded is recorded.” She printed it. A dollar a page, four pages. I paid her with the singles from my wallet and a lot of quarters, and she counted the quarters without making a face, which I appreciated.
I sat in the Buick in the parking garage and did the math with a pen on the back of the printout.
My father never put a fence up. He didn’t believe in them. He grew tomatoes along that side of the house, Better Boys, a long row of them, and after he got too old for it in the late eighties the bed went to grass. Dale Sterling put the chain-link in around ’92, a year after Dad died. I remember the crew. I remember thinking it was nice of Dale to pay for it.
Dale put it on the old line. The 1974 line.
Which meant the chain-link had been twenty-two feet wrong in the Sterlings’ favor for thirty-two years. The hydrangeas were on my land. The retaining wall was on my land. The corner of Richard’s hot tub patio, the one with the little propane fire pit, was on my land.
And his new stakes were twenty-five feet past all of that.
The forfeit clause was dead, sure. Carol was right. But the debt got paid. Gene paid it. He just didn’t pay it in cash.
I sat in that garage for a long time. A man in a security vest knocked on my window to ask if I was okay, and I said yes, and he didn’t believe me, and he was right not to.
Richard Rings the Bell
He came over Thursday at a quarter after five. I’d been expecting him since the bricks.
“Tom. Buddy.” Shoulder clap. Expensive watch. He smelled like the inside of a new car, which I guess makes sense. “Funny thing. I’ve got four tons of brick blocking my mailbox and my mail guy won’t stop. You know anything about that?”
“Sit down, Richard.”
He laughed. Then he saw I meant it, and he sat. Yellow Formica. He put his keys on the table, the big ring with the Sterling fob.
I gave him the contract first.
He read it with his eyebrows up, and by the end he was grinning. “Tom. Come on. This is cute. You know this isn’t worth the paper, right? My guy would laugh this out of – “
“I know. Carol at legal aid told me.”
“So what are we doing here?”
I gave him the quitclaim.
He read the first page fast, then slowed down. He turned to the second page. Turned back. His face did the thing faces do when a number on a spreadsheet comes out wrong and you start checking your own addition. He took out his phone, put it on the table, didn’t touch it.
“This was never surveyed.”
“It’s recorded.”
“My dad never said one word about – “
“Your dad didn’t know.”
I had one more thing. I’d found it that morning, after Pam. I went back up to the attic because Carol’s question was still bothering me, and I turned the lockbox upside down to shake out the dust, and there was an envelope taped to the underside of the lid. Masking tape gone brown and brittle. One word on the front in pencil: Walt.
I slid it across. Richard opened it carefully, more carefully than I’d have guessed, with his big salesman thumbs.
Walt,
I can’t make the rest. Not this year and I’m not going to sit here and tell you next year. You won’t take the house, I know you, you’d rather eat glass. So take the side yard. Twenty-two feet, Lorraine measured it with the clothesline. Grow your tomatoes on it.
I’m not telling Dale. He thinks we built that lot ourselves and I’d like him to go on thinking it awhile. He’s got a head on him but he’s proud, he gets it from me. Someday he ought to know. Maybe the grandkid, if Dale won’t.
You saved my life, you cheap son of a bitch.
Gene
Richard read it twice. I watched him do it. On the second time his lips moved a little on the grandkid.
He didn’t say anything for a while. The refrigerator kicked on. Outside, somebody’s sprinkler was going, that tick-tick-tick and then the long hiss back.
“He used to take me to the lot on Saturdays,” he said. “Let me honk all the horns. Every car on the lot, one at a time.” He put the letter down flat on the table and smoothed it with his palm, which didn’t do anything; it had been folded for forty-four years. “Dad always said Grandpa started with nothing.”
“He did. Then he borrowed nine thousand four hundred dollars from a lathe operator.”
I’m not proud of it, but I enjoyed saying that.
Richard looked up. “What do you want, Tom.”
Where It Was
I’d thought about it every night since the parking garage. I’d thought about calling Lisa’s friend who does real estate, about a survey, about Richard’s hot tub sitting on Pruitt property and what a lawyer could do with that. I’d thought about my mother’s Sears catalog.
“Pull the stakes,” I said. “Put the chain-link back where it was.”
“Where it was.” He frowned. “Not where the… not twenty-two feet over.”
“Where it was.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m seventy-one and I don’t want to mow it.”
He almost laughed. I almost did too. Neither of us quite got there.
“And the bricks?”
“Your curb’s your business.”
He stood up. He picked up the letter, then put it back down and looked at me, like he was asking. I shook my head. He nodded and took his keys and left without clapping me on anything.
The crew came Monday at seven. Four guys, one truck, one of them with a radio playing a ball game from the night before. They pulled the stakes. They dug new post holes in the old holes, exactly in them, I checked. By three o’clock there was chain-link running down the side of my yard again, and it looked like nothing had ever happened.
Lisa called that night.
“So you just gave him twenty-two feet.”
“I didn’t give him anything.”
“Dad.”
“It’s recorded. It’ll still be recorded when I’m dead. Then it’s yours.” I was eating crackers over the sink. “He knows that. He’ll know it every time he gets in that hot tub.”
She was quiet. Then she said, “You’re kind of a mean old man,” and she sounded pleased about it.
Wednesday morning there was a flat of tomato plants on my porch. Six of them, in the black plastic cells, the little stakes with the pictures stuck in the dirt. Better Boys. No note.
Could’ve been Richard. Could’ve been one of the crew guys, the one with the radio, who’d asked me Monday what used to grow along that side. Could’ve been Lisa; she orders me things online and forgets to tell me. I don’t know. I didn’t ask anybody.
I got the trowel out of the garage. Took the kneeling pad too, the green foam one, and it didn’t help the knee at all.
I put all six in along the fence, on my side, a foot apart.
—
Would you have taken the twenty-two feet? I keep going back and forth on it.
For more stories of neighbors who turn out to be far more complicated than they seem, read about the recluse with a surprising connection to a daughter’s hospital bill and the HOA president who showed up at the door in her robe. And for a reminder that even the most difficult neighbor can surprise you, there’s the man who carried a child through a storm.
