If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This Read Online Free PDF Page B

round of chemo.
    There’s so much you don’t know.
    For all you know I have three, maybe four months to live and Sam is up every night trying to figure out how he’s going to break it to our brain-damaged son that I won’t be coming to visit anymore. And I’m lying right there next to him, hour after hour, trying not to think about the possibility that our boy will be angry at me for this. Or maybe worse, maybe better, that he won’t even notice that I’m gone.
    You want to build a fence between our homes.
    It will be wood, you tell us.
    Y ou’re tall, and you’re young, and you paid a lot of money for that enormous house next to ours. It will be solid wood, you say, with no space or light between the slats. And it will be six feet high and run along the property line you had surveyed just this week.
    Understand, you say, I didn’t ask the surveyors to add land to my land. It just turns out that the line’s much closer to your house than anyone thought. I was every bit as surprised as you.
    And for a moment all three of us, you, me, and Sam, stare down at the pachysandra-covered ground.
    But if you build a six-foot-tall solid wall, I say, if you build it right where the pink flags are, I won’t be able to open my car door. Not without banging into your fence. Not within twenty feet of my front door, anyway. I’ll have to park at least twenty feet from my door.
    You only nod.
    Sam walks along the line, from flag to flag, then says, You’re telling me those hemlocks belong to you? You’re saying they’re not ours?
    It turns out they’re on my land.
    We’ve been paying to have them sprayed for years, I say. It’s been sixteen years. The whole time we’ve lived here. We thought they were ours.
    You say nothing. Sam says nothing.
    Why six feet tall? I finally ask. It seems awfully high. It’s so close to our house. We’ll just see a wall every time we come outside. We’re used to looking at the hemlocks. We’ve always had a view. Maybe they don’t belong to us, but we’ll feel like we’re walled in.
    We will be walled in, Sam says.
    I need it that tall because I’m going to get an animal. An animal could jump over a lower fence.
    We’ve been staring at these trees for sixteen years, I say. It’s going to be a big change. But that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that we won’t be able to park in front of our house.
    You nod. And then you hand me a letter. Our full names are typed on the envelope—complete with our middle initials. You’ve been looking through public records. You are doing this by the book. This is no friendly note held in my hand. It’s a document.
    H ere is the part I go over in my head:
    When I think about you buying the house, having the land surveyed, finding the property line just about in your neighbors’ driveway, telling them you’re going to build a wall, a solid wall, right there; this is the part that I still don’t understand.
    You know nothing about the reasons it might matter to us to be able to park right in front of our door.
    For example, in the cancer scenario, I’ll grow weak. That’s inevitable. Walking twenty feet will feel like a mile to me. Maybe I could do it, make the walk from the car, if we were just a foot or two from the house. But all the way down the drive, all the way from where there’s room to open the door, that’s just too far.
    So Sam is going to have to take out the folding wheelchair from the back. And wheel me up the drive. And then help me out from the chair and then, when he’s settled me in the house, he’ll have to wheel the chair, empty now, back down the drive to the car. And every time he does this he’ll suffer. Every time, his heart will break. Because one day soon, he knows, the chair will be empty for real.
    But back inside the house he tries to make me laugh—by imitating you. We’re going to get an animal, he says. An animal! A hippopotamus, in fact.
    What’s the deal, I ask, with a man who can’t just