Jayden's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Jayden read the man's deed twice, then handed it back. The handwriting was old and the boundary lines were vague. She told him she would check the records herself before any greenhouse went up. He didn't argue. She washed her hands at the spigot, changed her shirt, and walked into town to the squat stone building where land papers were kept. The records office smelled like dust and old paper. A clerk took her name and pulled a thick folder from a shelf. Inside was her own deed, folded around a surveyor's report. Jayden opened the map on the counter and smoothed the creases. The lines were drawn in red ink, with measurements written in a careful hand. She found her plot. She found the lot across from it. The boundary ran along the path, not through her tomatoes. The man's father had owned the land on the other side of the path. Not hers. Not one inch of hers. Jayden asked the clerk for a copy. The clerk stamped it and gave her a marked stick from a bin by the door, the kind the surveyors used to flag a boundary in the field. She walked back with the report under her arm and the stick in her hand. The fence the man had built sat four feet inside her rows. She stopped at the edge of her garden and looked at the greenhouse frame rising beyond it. Workers were bolting glass into place. The man stood near the lockbox, drinking coffee. She crossed to him and laid the report on the lockbox lid. She showed him the red line. She showed him where his land ended and hers began. She drove the marked stick into the soil at the true boundary, four feet beyond his fence. "Your greenhouse is on my plot," she said. "It has to come down." The man set his cup down slowly. He looked at the map, then at the stick, then at her. He didn't smile this time. He said he would speak to the workers. Jayden didn't thank him. She didn't apologize. She walked back to her tomatoes and knelt in the dirt, and her hands were shaking, but she kept pulling weeds that needed pulling now.