Willows For The Wall

A flatbed nursery truck idled at the curb in late September, two weeks after the bank’s moving pod cleared out of twenty-one ninety-one.

Adrian stood on his driveway with a garden hose, washing dust off the front walkway, when a man in mud-caked boots and a wide-brimmed straw hat walked over from next door. A woman with garden shears tucked into her back pocket trailed three paces behind him.

“Adrian, right?” the man said, extending a hand. “Scott Vance. That’s my wife, Priya.”

Adrian shook his hand, then Priya’s. “Good to meet you. Settling in?”

“Slowly,” Priya said. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of a wrist. “We’re tackling the yard first. The agent told us the previous owner ran it like a boutique motel. Said we might want to drop an inground plunge pool in the side corridor.”

Adrian’s grip tightened on the brass hose nozzle. “Did she.”

Scott let out a dry bark of laughter. “We told her she was out of her mind. I hate swimming. Grew up cleaning my father’s filter every Saturday morning in Tempe. Pine needles, chlorine rash, pump seals blowing out every July. Never again.”

“Same here,” Priya said. “Give me shade and zero water bills. We’re putting twelve desert willows right along the cinderblock wall.”

Adrian looked past them toward the trailer. The back was stacked with root-balled saplings, their slender branches tied with yellow twine. “Willows grow fast.”

“Ten feet in three years,” Scott said. “Thick canopy. If you ever sit on that upper balcony, you won’t see a thing on our side.”

“Or from yours to mine,” Adrian said.

“Even better,” Priya said. “Good fences, better trees.”

By three that afternoon, the thud of augers biting into desert clay echoed through the side corridor. Adrian sat out on the travertine deck under the patio pergola with Nicole, drinking iced tea from plastic tumblers.

Out in the water, Jordan sank under the surface, surfaced near the floating hoop, and launched a rubber ball with both hands. It bounced hard off the backboard and slapped the water. Ava floated on a foam noodle by the steps, kicking her heels against the coping and arguing with him about fouls.

Above the six-foot wall, the leafy tops of the willows already swayed in the dry afternoon breeze, breaking the sun into shifting bars of shadow across the stone. The master balcony at twenty-one ninety-one stood empty behind green leaves and silver-gray bark, its glass slider shut, blind to the yard below.

“They’re loud,” Nicole said, nodding toward the splash.

“Good,” Adrian said. He set his tumbler down on the stone and leaned back into the shade.