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    And then Sam says, Just don’t set a foot onto my land. My land, my land, he says in a Scarlett O’Hara voice, his fist raised in the air. And I try to laugh—for Sam. But eventually I have to raise the question of whether it’s time for us to tell our son. Because I can feel that there are only three or four more visits left in me. Power is running from my legs like sand down an hourglass. Do we tell Todd in advance? Or will I just be gone one day?
    W e hire a lawyer.
    I don’t want to, but your letter quotes township statutes and talks about your rights as a landowner. It’s just possible, Sam says, that we have rights too. He looks so worn and haggard as he speaks. He looks as though this is one thing too many. I say, Go ahead, hon. Hire a lawyer. Let somebody else take this on.
    Our lawyer sends you a letter. It says that we want you to hold up on construction while we investigate the situation. We want you to give us a chance to see if there’s any way around this. The phrase adverse possession appears in the second paragraph. We also send you a handwritten note, behind our lawyer’s back, saying we don’t want this to be a legal fight. Please. We just want you to let us open our car door in front of our house—as a courtesy. We only hired a lawyer because you gave us that document, you made it seem so official. We felt we had to do everything we could.
    Your response comes hand-delivered, overnight.
    “I have every right to erect a fence on my own property.”
    It says a bit more. But not much.
    There’s a conversation that hasn’t been had, I tell Sam. The conversation human beings have with each other. He isn’t quite treating us like people.
    He isn’t quite a person, Sam says. He’s a creature. He’s an animal himself. He’s like a yeti or something.
    He is! He looks exactly like a yeti. That scowl on his face. The way he stomps around his land. It’s inspired, I say. He’s the yeti.
    And that is what we call you after that.
    I suppose it’s this ability of yours not to care that intrigues me so.
    If I loved you, I would tell how much you’re missing because of that. I would find ways to convince you that I exist. I would resist erasure every moment that I could.
    F or several weeks the letters fly back and forth.
    You’re amazed that we think we have any rights.
    We’re amazed that you think rights are what’s at issue here.
    Sam says he’s going to paint a bright red stripe on our side of the line. It’ll be wet paint, he says. I’ll put it down on the day they’re building the fence. So if they set a foot on our property… if they set even one foot on our property…
    I’ll sit out there with a shotgun, I say. First one of them steps in red paint loses a leg…
    I want to scold you in the harsh, caressing tones of a mother to a child. I want to help you, make you understand more about the ways things should be than you do, make you think more, give you some imagination. I want you to imagine that I have a life. A life that matters. You should care about my life.
    S am stares out the kitchen window every night when he comes home from work.
I’ll miss the trees, he says.
I really will. I don’t give an answer.
Why make matters worse?
    A nother possibility is that Sam is in danger of losing his job.
    What if I have cancer, our son is out there in the institution, and, because the boy and I take up so much time, Sam is having trouble putting the hours in at work? They’ve tried to be patient with him, they know the situation, but the irony is it’s dragging on for too long. If I’d died six months ago instead of four months from now, there might not be a problem. They’re good guys. They do care. But this is too much.
    T he fence goes up on a day when we’re out.
    And you have no idea where we’ve been.
    I f I loved you, I would invite you in, sit you down in our kitchen, and I would say to you: You just never know. You, the yeti. You don’t know why this matters so