house for more than two years— eggs that my chickens laid that I could've sold! Eggs that
your family has been throwing away!” I was shouting at
him. Shouting at an adult, like I'd never shouted at anyone in my entire life.
His voice got very quiet. “I'm sorry. I don't know about any eggs. Who did you give them to?”
“Bryce!” My throat choked closed as I said his name again. “Bryce.”
Mr. Duncan nodded slowly and said, “Well,” then went back to pruning his bush. “That
probably explains it.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed. “The boy still has a ways to go.”
I just stared at him, not trusting myself with the words sizzling on my tongue.
“Oh, he's a very handsome boy, there's no denying that,” he said with a frown. Then he
snapped a branch and added, “The spitting image of his
father.”
I shook my head. “Why are you over here, Mr. Duncan? If you don't think I need the help and
you're not feeling bad about the eggs, then why would
you do this?”
“Honestly?”
I just looked at him, straight in the eye.
He nodded, then said, “Because you remind me of my wife.”
“Your wife?”
“That's right.” He gave me a little smile and said, “Renée would've sat up in that tree with you.
She would've sat there all night.”
And with those two sentences, my anger vanished. “Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“She's … she died?”
He nodded. “And I miss her terribly.” He tossed a branch into the heap and chuckled.
“There's nothing like a head-strong woman to make you
happy to be alive.”
The last thing in the world I expected was to become friends with Bryce's grandfather. But by
dinnertime I knew so much about him and his wife
and the adventures they'd had together that it seemed like I'd known him for a very long time.
Plus, all his stories made the work seem easy. When I
went in for the night, the bushes were all pruned back, and except for the enormous heap in
the center of the yard, things were already looking a
whole lot better.
The next day he was back. And when I smiled and said, “Hi, Mr. Duncan,” he smiled back
and said, “Call me Chet, won't you?” He looked at the
hammer in my hand and said, “I take it we're starting on the fence today?”
Chet taught me how to plumb a line for the pickets, how to hold a hammer down on the end
of the handle instead of choking up on it, how to
calculate an adjusted spacing for the pickets, and how to use a level to get the wood exactly
vertical. We worked on the fence for days, and the
whole time we worked we talked. It wasn't just about his wife, either. He wanted to know
about the sycamore tree and seemed to understand exactly
what I meant when I told about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. “It's that
way with people, too,” he said, “only with people it's
sometimes that the whole is less than the sum of the parts.”
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I thought that was pretty interesting. And the next day during school I looked around at the
people I'd known since elementary school, trying to
