Then his son Kyle returned home from college.
Kyle was twenty-two.
Within two weeks, I understood something about the young man.
Dennis had made a mistake raising him.
Not because he had given Kyle too much.
Giving your children opportunities is not wrong.
The mistake was that somewhere along the way, providing things had replaced teaching responsibility.
Kyle had grown up with everything he needed and most things he wanted.
Worse, he knew it.
And he seemed to have built much of his personality around the belief that consequences belonged to other people.
He was loud because no one had ever required him to lower his voice.
He was careless because someone else had always been available to fix whatever he damaged.
And he owned a motorcycle.
A very expensive motorcycle.
He rode it with the confidence of someone who had far less experience than he wanted people to believe.
All summer, the neighborhood tolerated him.
Not because anyone enjoyed it.
Because neighborhoods are complicated little social systems.
Sometimes people decide that confronting a problem will create more trouble than simply enduring it.
Dennis was wealthy, connected, and protective of his son.
Mrs. Patterson, who lived on the corner, once knocked on Dennis’s door after Kyle blocked her driveway late at night.
Dennis apologized politely.
Kyle did it again.
The Nguyen family watched him cut across the edge of their carefully maintained lawn more than once.
Eventually, they stopped saying anything.
I watched.
I remembered.
And I wrote things down.
Roy used to joke that I had the mind of an auditor.
He meant it affectionately.
I always observe before I act.
I collect information.
I wait until individual incidents begin forming a pattern.
By the end of summer, Kyle’s pattern was obvious.
Eventually, he was going to damage something important to someone.
And when it happened, he would shrug.
I simply didn’t know the important thing would belong to me.
It happened on a Saturday afternoon near the end of September.
The garden was still beautiful.
Autumn had begun changing the light, but the first frost hadn’t arrived yet.
The red and yellow flowers were in their final bright weeks.
I was making tea when I heard Kyle’s motorcycle.
The engine grew louder.
Too loud.
He was accelerating when he should have been slowing down.
By the time I reached the window, I already knew something was wrong.
Kyle came around the corner too quickly.
Instead of completing the turn properly, he cut across my front lawn.
The rear tire went directly through Roy’s garden.
It happened in perhaps two seconds.
