I said, “I know of incidents going back to year two, so four years.”
He said, “The peaches.”
I said, “Forty-seven peaches. Three years of work.”
He said, “I’m sorry.” He said it the way people say it when they mean it—not the quick reflexive apology that is really just social management, but the kind that has some weight behind it, some actual reckoning.
I looked at him.
I said, “Gary, you ate fruit out of my garden for four years without once thinking about what it cost me to grow it. Not just in money. In time. In care. In the particular investment you make in a living thing that you are trying to help survive. Do you understand that?”
He said, “I think I understand it better now than I did before.”
I said, “The peppers helped with that understanding.”
He said, “They did. Yeah.”
A pause.
He said, “I didn’t know they were peppers. I genuinely thought they were tomatoes.”
I said, “I know.”
He said, “Did you know I would mistake them?”
I said, “I grew them in a bed where you had been helping yourself to tomatoes for years. I thought there was a reasonable chance.”
He said, “That’s pretty calculated.”
I said, “Gary, I have a degree in biology, thirty-one years of teaching science, and four years of being robbed from. I am capable of a certain level of calculation.”
He looked at me for a long moment, then he said something that surprised me.
He said, “My mother had a garden when I was a kid. She grew tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers, and she used to send me out to pick things for dinner.” He paused. “I don’t know why I thought it was okay to just take from yours. I think I just didn’t think about whose it was.”
I said, “That’s honest.”
He said, “I’m going to plant something in my own yard. I don’t know what, but something.”
I said, “I can help you with that if you want. I know a fair amount about growing things.”