At seventy-one, you learn that anger is a waste of breath, but quiet action actually gets things done.
The next morning, the crisp autumn air carried the usual Sunday silence until a door slammed across the street. The neighbor’s son walked out, holding his motorcycle helmet, ready for another loud morning of terrorizing the neighborhood.
Then he stopped dead in his tracks.
Waiting right beside his pristine, expensive motorcycle was a large ceramic pot stuffed with red and yellow flowers—the exact colors of my ruined garden. Taped to his handlebars was a printed sheet of paper flapping in the breeze, and leaning against the garage with his arms folded was Gerald himself, his face grim.
Tyler’s head snapped up in shock, his eyes locking straight onto my front window.
I gave him a small, polite two-finger wave.
The night before, when Tyler had shrugged off my grief, I hadn’t called the police or wasted my breath. Instead, I had called my sister—though she hadn’t been the one to act. Unknown to me at the time, my neighbor Denise—who had ducked inside earlier only because she was secretly dating Gerald and planning how to handle his spoiled son—had gone straight over to Gerald’s house the moment Tyler left.
Now, across the street, Gerald’s voice carried down the driveway.
“Read it out loud, Tyler,” Gerald demanded, pointing at the handlebars.
Tyler swallowed hard, his arrogant smirk entirely gone. With shaking hands, he read the paper:
“I, Tyler, will work with a landscaper to make a full replacement of my neighbor’s garden. Every single bulb will be replaced by my hand under Mrs. Halloran’s supervision.”
“And don’t you dare think an apology covers it,” Gerald scolded, holding out his hand. “Keys. Now.”
The motorcycle keys landed in Gerald’s palm with a heavy jingle.
That afternoon, Tyler stood on my porch in brand-new gardening gloves, holding a tray of starters as if they might bite him. Under the strict eye of a professional landscaper and his father, he spent hours kneeling in the dirt, carefully digging and patting the soil around Abraham’s flowers.
As he worked in silence, the arrogance melted away, and I finally told him the story behind the red and yellow blooms. By the time the garden was restored, the late-night revving had stopped for good, Denise and Gerald had finally gone public with their relationship, and my yard was peaceful once again.
